Re: Ada Core Technologies announces GNATCOM

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <wccd7nvazxw.fsf@world.std.com>,
  Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote:

> Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
>
> > Indeed the quoted paragraph above is EXACTLY the confusion
> > that caused this unsupportable design of the C_Pass_By_COpy
> > pragma in the first place.
>
> I don't recall it that way.  I think the reasoning was that
when people
> conceptually want to pass a struct in C, they usually pass a
pointer to
> it, so we should mimic that.  Flawed reasoning, I admit.  But
surely you
> don't think that the designers of Ada 9X were confused about
the
> difference between passing by reference, versus passing the
address of a
> copy?!

I don't understand the above paragraph in relation to the
C_Pass_By_Copy pragma as opposed to the RM. My quote above
was specifically about this pragma.

> > Unfortunately, there is nothing much we can do at this stage
> > except live with a little mess here, luckily cases where C
> > programmers pass records as parameters (as opposed to
pointers
> > to records) are rare.

> Yes.  Somehow, "rare" became "nonexistent, so don't worry
about it."
> *That* was the mistake.


Again, you seem to be talking about the RM here, the
C_Pass_By_Copy is all about dealing with the rare case???


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