Re: Access to subprograms

[ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen)]

In article <FRED.95Mar20101937@play.uno>, fred@play.uno (Fred Hosch) writes: 

|> From my casual and uninformed reading of the RM, it
|> seems that something like "+"'Access is legal, even,
|> heaven forbid, for a predefined instance of "+".

It's prohibited by RM95 6.3.1, paragraphs 4, 7, and 11.  (Predefined "+"
operators have convention Intrinsic, and 'Access is prohibited for
subprograms with this convention.)  Instead, you can write

   function My_Wrapper (Left, Right: Integer) return Integer is
   begin
      return Left + Right;
   end My_Wrapper;

(or similarly for some other numeric type) and write My_Wrapper'Access.

But why "heaven forbid"?  It would have been easy for the compiler to
generate a wrapper function like this automatically and invisibly, and it
strikes me as a gratuitous nuisance to make the programmer go through the
ritual.  It also makes the language less uniform.

|> Can anyone provide a pointer?

Cute pun.

|> Thanks.

You're welcome.

--
Norman H. Cohen    ncohen@watson.ibm.com