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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada And Alternate System Architectures
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 13:11:40 -0500
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>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?

Yes, Ada does support machines that don't have 8 bit bytes. There have
existed Ada compilers for machines that don't have 8-bit bytes. For
instance, we made a version of Janus/Ada 95 for the Unisys U2200, which
has 36-bit words, and to a lesser extent, 6 and 9 bit bytes.

Types like Character and Stream_Element can have any size appropriate to
the hardware. The main problem is importing and exporting data created
in such formats.

            Randy Brukardt.