Re: Ada to C Translator

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

In article <n12r29.qrv.ln@leia>,
  Frode =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Tenneb=F8?= <frodet@nvg.org> wrote:
> Does the time of posting give ANY leniancy? :)

Sure, we will count it as a post from last year, and start the
new year afresh :-)

> Actually, half the time was spent on two
> part-systems (out of app. 30) with rather nasty circular
> dependencies.

Well you probably don't mean circular dependencies, since these
are illegal in Ada 83 and Ada 95, but more likely you mean code
where the elaboration is in a mess, due to serious bugs of
missing pragma Elaborate's. This is not uncommon, and can
indeed be a pain.

That's why we recommend that all new Ada applications use the
GNAT static elaboration approach to avoid this in the future
(and why we make it the default, so incompetent programmers who
don't know what they are doing in this area will accidentally
do the right thing :-)

But of course for many existing legacy applications with
confused elaboration situations, the use of the default static
elaboration mechanism is infeasible.

It is amazing how much of our support effort is spent in
helping people navigate around elaboration problems that are
really bugs in the original code. This is definitely a weak
spot in the design of Ada, I am sorry we could not fix it for
Ada 95, but there just was not enough time.


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