Re: Streams in Ada

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

As I understand the notion of Storage_Element, they rather intended for this
to correspond to whatever the hardware would normally reference with a
machine address and pull off the bus. The fact that there may be
instructions that let you pick apart that chunk of stuff you pulled from the
bus wouldn't be a consideration because you'd be looking for the machine's
most efficient means of referencing data. Hence, even though the PDP-10
could easily disect the 36 bit words, you'd still want Storage_Element to be
36 bits because that was the smallest chunk of data you could extract from
main memory. (IIRC, it was an 18 bit address, right? And I *do* remember
using 7 bit ASCII with one bit left over! :-)

So this hypothetical Ada95 compiler would use 36 bits to store a character
or array of characters? You'd have to use packing or other representation
clauses to get the characters into a single word? Hmmmmmmm....... That would
probably provide all sorts of ammunition for the Anti-Ada-Zealots.

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/


"Robert A Duff" <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote in message
news:wccae5zw4hm.fsf@world.std.com...
>
> Sounds like a bad idea to me.  Storage_Element'Size should be 36 on the
> PDP-10.  I believe anything else would be unnecessarily inefficient.
>