From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham
	autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,29f36805b9a20fe8
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-04-02 14:03:53 PST
Path: 
 supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!supernews.com!news.gv.tsc.tdk.com!news.iac.net!newsgate.cistron.nl!news.tele.dk!195.158.233.21!news1.ebone.net!news.ebone.net!newsfeed.freenet.de!news-lei1.dfn.de!news-nue1.dfn.de!news-han1.dfn.de!news.fh-hannover.de!news.cid.net!news.enyo.de!news1.enyo.de!not-for-mail
From: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Streams in Ada
Date: 02 Apr 2001 23:13:50 +0200
Organization: Enyo's not your organization
Message-ID: <878zlj6m41.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>
References: <v7mx6.7111$MZ2.1190619@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com>
 <wccwv95fulm.fsf@world.std.com> <iq%x6.234$UK4.22262@www.newsranger.com>
 <tglmpjxutl.fsf@mercury.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> <9aa3dd$efb$1@nh.pace.co.uk>
 <tgofufwd4x.fsf@mercury.rus.uni-stuttgart.de>
 <zc1y6.352$UK4.34815@www.newsranger.com>
 <tgpuevurlk.fsf@mercury.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> <wccae5zw4hm.fsf@world.std.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:6377
Date: 2001-04-02T23:13:50+02:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> writes:

> > If I were writing an Ada compiler for the PDP-10, I would probably
> > choose Storage_Element'Size = 9.
> 
> Sounds like a bad idea to me.  Storage_Element'Size should be 36 on the
> PDP-10.  I believe anything else would be unnecessarily inefficient.

Are you sure?  There are quite a few Ada compilers out there which use
Storage_Element'Size = 8 even though it's inefficient on that
particular platform.  I think the size of a storage element is pretty
irrelevant for efficiency concerns.

> >...IIRC, the GCC porters are doing a
> > similar thing (CHAR_BITS == 8).

Oops, CHAR_BITS == 9 of course.
 
> That's because of various problems with the C language, which don't
> exist in Ada.  C has no packed arrays, for example.  Plus the fact that
> C culture has grown up in such a way that there's a huge amount of code
> that implicitly assumes that char is 8 bits.

An 8 bit char on a PDP-10 doesn't work.  Only values which are
divisors of 36 are acceptable.