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From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Subject: Re: Two ideas for the next Ada Standard
Date: 1996/09/06
Message-ID: <50opus$l05@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1
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references: <50aao3$3r88@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net> <dewar.841590835@schonberg>
 <322B5BB0.422E@joy.ericsson.se> <50gelc$2le@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
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 <dewar.841911826@schonberg>
organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
nntp-posting-user: ok
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-09-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>Richard said

>"Wearing my Lisp hat:  only because Ada doesn't actually support integers,
>but a machine-dependent set of machine-dependent small bounded integers."

>Actually that's not quite true, whether Ada supports arbitrary precision
>integers is an implemention dependent issue.

Thank you for the explanation.  I expect to be learning Ada 95 for a long
time.  However, Ada (the _standard_ language) can hardly be said to
"support" a feature that it allows but does not _require_ an implementation
to provide.  One of the few things I dislike about Scheme is that it has
this nice well-thought-out "numeric tower", but implementations aren't
required to provide all of it, so Scheme code _written to the standard_
that crunches complex numbers doesn't port.

I even feel as though I'm on thin ice when I use Long_Float.
The standard says "IF Long_Float is predefined ..."

-- 
Australian citizen since 14 August 1996.  *Now* I can vote the xxxs out!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.