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From: dewarr@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Re: Freeing Pointers to classwide types
Date: 1998/10/01
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In article <36131a1b.34896409@SantaClara01.news.InterNex.Net>,
  tmoran@bix.com (Tom Moran) wrote:
> >But it is a trivial excercise to rewrite this so that it uses an Ada
> >allocator
> Without using Unchecked_Conversion and Unchecked_Deallocation?

And why on earth would you try to avoid these? You can write perfectly
portable code using these routines if you know what you are doing. It
is particularly odd to complain about the use of Unchecked_Deallocation
in a routine devoted to storage allocation and deallocation, and there
is nothing at all non-portable about the kind of use of UD you would
use here. As for UC, sure you have to be careful how you use it, and
from a formal point of view, it is probably true that the RM will not
guarantee that what you would write would work, but that should not
deter you from writing perfectly portable code (in practice) using UC.

It is always surprising when people are absolutely set against UC, and
the result is that people write code in C that is exactly equivalent.

I remember one comparison of Ada vs C presentation I saw for an AI
application. The C was much faster. Virtually 100% of the difference
was in allocation. I asked what was going on

"Do you use malloc?"

"Oh no, that's far too slow, we wrote our own allocator in C"

"Well why didn't you do the same in Ada"

"Because it wouldn't have been portable"

"But your C is not portable in a formal sense anyway"

"Well it works on three different machines!!!"

Sigh!

Ada folks are good at shooting themselves in the foot, and it isn't even
the language that's doing it :-)

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