Re: ifdef replacement for GNAT

[raw@cs.wisc.edu]

In article <dewar.892261504@merv>,
  dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:
> The Steelman requirements prohibited the inclusion of preprocessing in
> the Ada language, which may surprise you. What may surprise you more is
> that I and many others think this is a *good thing*.

The second statement did not surprise me; the first one did.  I looked at
Steelman at http://www.adahome.com/History/Steelman/steelman.htm
but I'm still not sure where it prohibits preprocessing.

It lists reliability and maintainability among the goals, which would imply
this but is not very specific.  It talks about conditional compilation; in
6C, it says "Only the selected branch shall be compiled when the
discriminating condition is a translation time expression." (regarding
the conditional control structure), so it would seem that Ada doesn't
need #ifdef because it has if.

I'd guess you meant the statement from 13G that "Translators shall do
full syntax and type checking" which would rule out text preprocessing
(given the various requirements on syntax and types); is this correct?

--
MJSR

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