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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Higher precision and generics
Date: 18 Mar 1995 20:23:16 -0500
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Message-ID: <3kg124$elp@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <3jsnbf$ido@nef.ens.fr> <795197606snz@linkmsd.com>
 <3k6ljm$bhp@nef.ens.fr> <3kbhv0$jcl@maple.enet.net>
 <3kbvpt$ltk@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de>
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Date: 1995-03-18T20:23:16-05:00
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Peter Hermann says:

"1. "with system;" makes the program non-portable"

This is *quite* wrong. Sure the definitions in System are target
dependent, but in many cases they are there PRECISELY to allow you
to write portable target-independent code that uses target dependent
features.

There are many situations in which the ONLY way to make a program portable
is to use the values in System. For example, a program that assumes
the addressabloe unit is 8-bits is much less portable than a program
that uses System
.Storage_Unit for this purpose.