Re: ADA compilers can reject types arbitrarily?

[Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

Anonymous Coward wrote:
> In article <wcchdafhxo5.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>, 

> 
> Amazing.  So an ADA compiler can even reject an operational spec, and
> still be considered an ADA compiler.  ie. an ADA compiler can reject:
> 
>   type my_record is record
>     my_integer : integer;
>   end record;
> 
> I think that is gives way too much freedom to the compiler.
> Technically any ADA compiler can reject my composit types, and I have
> no expectation that my code will run.  I'm blown away by this.  Even
> worse, the compiler doesn't have to reject the types at compile time
> -- it can wait until run time to raise exceptions.  What am I missing?

You know...Sometimes we take the whole idea of the letter of the spec 
too far. I don't think there is anything that prevents a compiler from 
implementing multiplication with a loop doing repetative addition but I 
have also never seen a compiler that does it.

While I have seen a vendor or two hang their lackluster performance on 
some corner case wording of the reference manual, at some point 
(especially in this post Ada mandate world) you have to expect market 
pressures will prevent compilers from doing things that are totally idiodic.

There are places where perhaps the LRM could be made a little bit tigher 
but in general the freedom is there to allow support on strange 
computing architectures. It is a shame that we pay for this with 
ambiguity on all of the "real" computing architectures.....