Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor (Was: why ada is so unpopular ?)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Maybe its just you. :-) I don't run into it every day - its just that 
when you run into it, its like hitting a brick wall at 100mph.

Code can be 100% totally legal and not compile. I can write you 
representation clauses all day long that are 100% pure Ada and will just 
make the compiler puke all over the place. (Or perhaps not give you what 
you want - which may be even worse). Compiler X may support the 
statement but Compiler Y may not. Worse, Compiler X for Target A may 
consider it legal but Compiler X for Target B does not. When you run 
into it, you end up pulling out your hair wishing you had some means of 
making the compiler ignore the version of the statement that you don't 
want for the particular target.

Sometimes its a really, really little thing and you start considering 
another layer of indirection and separate build paths and the potential 
inefficiencies of the extra indirection (for me, that's often an issue) 
and you're going "Damnation! If I just had one little itsy-bitsy, 
insignificant, tiny conditional compilation directive here, I'd save 
myself the massive trouble of having to deal with two separate builds 
and all the headaches that go with it! Curse you, Ada Lovelace!!!" I'd 
rather not have that headache - and sometimes there are prohibitions or 
problems with multiple build paths that make it difficult or impossible. 
So you find some way of suffering under durress and muddling through and 
envying the guys who get to use C. :-)

MDC


Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 
> Is it just me, or is this really an issue?  Remember it IS static, which 
> means that it does give you contitional compilation at compile time. 
> What it doesn't give you is the ability to write code that is illegal, 
> and compile anyway if it is not in the (static) execution path.
> 
> I just never run into this situation unless there is a bug.  There is 
> one case that I am aware of where this CAN happen, supplying a value for 
> digits in a floating point type declaration, or declaring an integer or 
> modular type that is too large for the implementation.
> 
> Of course, I use GNAT. GNAT now supports IEEE floating-point and 64-bit 
> integer, fixed, decimal, and modular types for all versions. That is 
> enough for me.
> 


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