Re: ada -> C translator

[fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)]

kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) writes:

>The issue isn't support of non-portable constructs, but representation
>of data items.  Specifically, discriminated records.  You will
>probably be forced to generate code that has specific offsets encoded
>into it.  These offsets will depend on the sizes of primitive
>datatypes.
>
>It just *might* be possible to write all these in terms of type sizes
>at the C level and make it portable, but that's *really* hard if
>possible at all.

Well, it's certainly possible.  Whether it is practical or not is
another question.

One possibility is to use

	union Word { long l; void *p; };

as essentially your only data type in the generated C code.
Then you can use arrays instead of structs and you can calculate
offsets portably.

Of course, this is not efficient.  But you can use conditional compilation...

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