Re: Ada And Alternate System Architectures

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Ada bends over backwards to avoid specifying anything that would make it
impossible or impractical to implement Ada on just about any platform. For
example, Ada specifies Streams which will most often be implemented as 8-bit
bytes, but the element type is defined in terms of some system defined
storage unit - so it could be 16-bit words or anything else you like.
Similarly, the standard integer types have a minimum range required. For
example, ARM 3.5.4(21) says:

21 In an implementation, the range of Integer shall include the
range -2**15+1 .. +2**15-1.

That would suggest at least 16 bits - but it could be (and often is) 32
bits. On a PDP-10 it might be 36 bits.

Ada does exist on processors that aren't 8-bit byte machines. The
Mil-Std-1750a comes immediately to mind.

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/


"Gary Scott" <Gary.L.Scott@lmtas.lmco.com> wrote in message
news:3B8528F1.7B664D21@lmtas.lmco.com...
> Hi,
>
> A very naive question...does the Ada standard adequately address
> non-8-bit byte computers?  The Fortran language standard committee
> consistently avoids defining anything that relates to a specific
> computer architecture implementation (because what if 6-bit character
> systems one day become common again...).  At a very high level, how are
> machine specifics addressed?