Re: Overlay allowability

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <390D94FB.D23390D4@lmco.com>,
  "Marc A. Criley" <marc.a.criley@lmco.com> wrote:
> A few times in my career I've encountered situations where two
> different representations of the same set of bits are desired in a
> high

> This has always struck me as somewhat iffy, but I confess I've used
> it as well on a couple occasions with Ada 83.  I've always found that
> it works as one intuitively expects, so long as all alignment, layout
> and sizing aspects are fully thought through and accommodated.

In Ada 83 I believe doing that rendered your program erronious. In 95,
I'm not sure, but its probably been reassigned to "bounded error" territory.

This is exactly what Unchecked_Conversion was put in the language for.
If performance prohibits copying the whole structure, you can always
perform unchecked conversion on an access type that points to your
structure (even SMART allowed this).

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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