Re: Question about "for X'Size use ..."

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message news:<871ymk480x.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>...
> (I think that AI 270 is pointless.  Stream_Size won't give any
> additional portability unless the order of stream elements can be
> controlled, and the method of storing the sign, and the situations
> were the range of type neither is not symmetric around zero.)

You are missing a lot here!

Indeed AI 270 is quite significant in achieving interoperability,
and was motivated by the fact that compilers were not interoperable
before (because of unexpectedly large base types), and now they
are. The mention of storing the sign is a bit bogus, given that
virtually all machines are twos complement now. More importantly
you now get complete interoperability for the type

   type x is range 0 .. 255;
   for x'size use 8;

which was not the case before

If you think an AI is pointless, you are probably missing something.
AI's don't get approved without a lot of very well informed highly
skeptical perusal and discussion by the ARG :-)