Re: endian-independent rep clauses (was Re: GNAT Opinions)

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <7667t3$3kj$1@remarQ.com>,
  "Pat Rogers" <progers@NOclasswideSPAM.com> wrote:
> dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote in message
> >Consider one of the most fundamental, which
> >is that you have an external data stream that produces a
> >big endian integer as four consecutive bytes in
> >big-endian order. There is no magic rep clause to cause
> >a compiler on a little-endian machine to acquire this
> >data "correctly". Indeed the difficulty may vary from
> >machine to machine, on some machines a quite long and
> >tedious sequence of instructions may be required to
> >reassemble the data.
>
> I answer with more than a little trepidation, knowing
> that you are capable of arguing one side to "victory"
> only to then switch and
> argue the other side!  :-)

Well I should hope so, if you can't argue both sides of
a technical issue, it must mean you don't understand the
issue and therefore should not argue on either side :-)

> Seriously, I would consider the above to be a separate
> problem, since indeed a record rep clause will not handle
> it.  It does what Norm said it does, and nothing more.

Yes, and seriously, that *is* the problem. Most people when
they ask about this problem, and in particular when they
ask about overriding the default bit order are after a
solution for this "separate problem"!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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