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From: tmoran@acm.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor
References: <401272E3.4040506@noplace.com>
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4782
Date: 2004-01-24T19:32:20+00:00
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>Rep clauses are ugly in the sense that "In A Perfect World" we'd want to
>let the compiler worry about how to represent data. Inherently, they
>make the code compiler and target dependent. By their very existence,
>you can't just hand someone some body of code and say "Trust me. It will
  I don't understand what you use rep clauses for.  I normally use them
when a data structure must be shared outside my program, by a hardware
device, an OS call, another program, etc.  For those, the rep clause does
not change when you change compiler or target machine - unless your target
*requires* a change because it demands a different representation.  Not
even a perfect compiler could do that automatically.