Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[geert@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl (Geert Bosch)]

Robert Dewar (dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu) wrote:

  "Another example in Ada is the

      x : array (1 .. 10) of ...

   which again defaults to type Integer. Given that we generally accept
   that it is a bad idea for programs to use the built in Integer type,
   it is quite inappropriate to have this kind of default. "

Although in practice I almost never use an Integer literal for
specifying the upperbound of a range, I don't see any reason why it is
"bad" in general to use the predefined Integer type as index type.

Especially for array indices and string lengths, I find using the
predefined type very useful. It might be that people on a 16-bit 
machine with 16-bit integers might not be able to handle strings
longer than 65536 characters, or arrays with more than 2**16 elements.
But they won't expect to be able to do so, so what's the problem? 
Using 32-bit array indices would not be efficient on that type of machine.

Also all standard packages use Integer subtypes so a Bounded_String is
always a type using the default type Integer as range? Is this a risk?
Although I certainly can appreciate Ada's strong typing, taking it to
the extreme causes code type casting all over the place which *really* 
makes strong typing useless.
-- 
E-Mail: geert@sun3.iaf.nl