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From: ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen)
Subject: Re: Ada is almost useless in embedded systems
Date: 1996/03/15
Message-ID: <4ichi8$17tg@watnews1.watson.ibm.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 142912966
distribution: world
references: <9603131418.AA01642@eight-ball>
organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
reply-to: ncohen@watson.ibm.com
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <9603131418.AA01642@eight-ball>, Bob Crispen
<revbob@EIGHT-BALL.HV.BOEING.COM> writes: 

|> What I'm shocked at is that Ada stopped at 16!  How hard would it have
|> been to permit *any* numeric base?  Anyone who's ever written a Forth
|> compiler knows how simple it is, and how useful things like base-36
|> encoding can be.  How many encoding/decoding routines have been written
|> that could have been obviated by making the compiler do this work?

And for bases 37 and higher, from what alphabet do you choose the digits
for 36, 37, 38, ...?

Let's face it, based literals were placed in Ada to provide a clear
correspondence with bit patterns and with specifications expressed in
binary, octal, or hex.  Has anybody out there ever found a genuine
application for literals in any of the bases 3 .. 7 | 9 | 11 .. 15?

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