Re: Dynamic allocation in the predefined language environment

[Matthias-Christian Ott <ott@mirix.org>]

On 06/07/15 14:23, G.B. wrote:
> On 06.07.15 16:16, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
>> On 06/07/15 14:06, Bob Duff wrote:
>>> Matthias-Christian Ott <ott@mirix.org> writes:
>>>> ...I suppose most implementations will
>>>> raise a Storage_Error exception but the standard does not specify how
>>>> the packages are to implemented so a program could simply crash and
>>>> would still conform to the standard.
>>>
>>> No, running out of memory raises Storage_Error.  The implementation
>>> cannot "simply crash".
>>
>> It could be implemented in C or assembly language and than it could
>> definitely crash.
> 
> It could be written in C or assembly, but then if it crashed
> on out of memory, it is not an implementation. (I'll trust
> co-author of the Ada LRM, Bob Duff, on this.)

Then to finish this discussion: If it is required to raise
Storage_Error, then it should be in the standard. There are only a
handful of Ada compilers which most likely all raise Storage_Error but I
think the history of C shows that if there is an ambiguity in the
standard, both compiler writers and software developers will interpret
it differently, so that both different compilers and the assumptions of
software developers about these compilers will differ.

- Matthias-Christian