Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan)]

In article <dewar.848071187@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
 
 >With respect to the array notation, it is ALWAYS a bad idea to take
 >advantage of this. If for some reason you want type Integer say so:
 >
 >   x : array (Integer range 1 .. 10) of ..
 >
 >This will immediately draw attention to the fact that you are introducing
 >the use of a potentially implementation dependent type into your code.

Which is important in the above example, because you might later want
to port the code to an implementation whose default Integer is too
small to hold the value 10.

:)

I think the idea of always specifying Integer explicitly is valuable,
but the example chosen is unfortunate.  In the above case, the
explicit use of Integer "draws attention" to something that is in this
case irrelevant.  Of course, if you're specifying integer types for
all your array bounds, you should do it here too for consistency.  But
I hope that if I code the above statement, no one reading the code is
going to pay much attention to the fact that I'm using an
implementation-dependent integer type.

                                -- Adam