Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

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

Rep clauses are ugly in the sense that "In A Perfect World" we'd want to 
let the compiler worry about how to represent data. Inherently, they 
make the code compiler and target dependent. By their very existence, 
you can't just hand someone some body of code and say "Trust me. It will 
compile & run on your machine..." Rep clauses are actually one of the 
better arguments for needing conditional compilation. (Target A? Use 
this rep! Target B? Use that one!)

Oh sure. They are better than a sharp stick in the eye and if you have 
to  control representation, they're an elegant solution. But they are 
still "Butt Ugly" in the sense that the instant you use one, you can't 
promise that the code will work *anywhere* except on the one 
compiler/target where you built it.

As for submitting something to the ARG? I'll leave that to the language 
lawyers. They'll come up with far better proposals than I could ever 
write - so long as they think the idea might be a good one. I'm just the 
end-user of Ada - a customer - expressing what he thinks would make the 
language more usable on a day-to-day level. We're a dwindling herd, so 
maybe those opinions ought to get some attention by the people who make 
and sell Ada. Hope springs eternal! :-)

MDC

Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
> I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Rep clauses are an elegant way
> of getting the job done; the only alternative is bit mask operations and
> those are a lot harder to understand. And they certainly aren't about just
> interfacing to hardware - I use them a lot to reduce storage use without
> making critical parts too slow. So I guess I'd say that rep. clauses ARE
> pretty. You'd be better off picking on Access_to_Address_Conversions or
> something like that -- except that no one much uses any of those packages.
> Perhaps because they are ugly.



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Marin David Condic
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