Re: RISC

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

No, you are not alone. There have been a number of times that I and others
have raised problems in this forum relating to representation clauses. I
have had particular troubles with representation clauses on tagged records
and private records. I know others have had similar experiences. Inevitably,
there are work-arounds that will let you get the job done, but they are
typically inefficient or inelegant or, more commonly, both.

Resorting to some version of byte arrays & unchecked conversions or overlays
is one way of dealing with it. However (while it is typically reasonably
efficient) I find those solutions to be inelegant in that - if for no other
reason - the compiler ought to know where record fields lie and ought to be
able to keep track of that stuff better than I can - so why shouldn't it get
the job of knowing where to divide up the bytes and bits? (I want to fight
the problem, not the compiler or the language!) If you hide the movement of
bytes-to-fields/fields-to-bytes down at some low level, at least you hide
the information from the rest of the system and isolate your problems. It
just frustrates me because I can see much nicer, much more elegant ways of
doing this sort of thing and it is only slightly out of reach.....

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Martin Dowie" <martin.dowie@gecm.com> wrote in message
news:3ab1d090$1@pull.gecm.com...
> I gave up on record rep clauses a while back after similar frustrations.
Am
> I
> alone in this? These days, for interface level stuff I work with byte
arrays
> and
> do all the conversions explicitly myself (loads of modular arithmatic,
which
> I'd
> have to admit finding quite fun getting what I want sometimes :-)
>
> Has anyone been down this path before and stopped any pitfalls I'm not
> aware of?
>