Re: Ada and Internet stuff

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

In practical terms, I'm not sure that it is terribly important. Most
computers these days have memory addressable in 8-bit bytes and
communications equipment that is oriented towards 8-bit bytes. I doubt that
there are many actual, validated implementations of Ada95 that *don't* use 8
bits for a stream element. In most applications, I would feel very
comfortable writing code that depended on Stream_Element being an 8-bit byte
and not worrying about absolute portability. Most apps are not ported to
begin with and the minority that are, typically are going to be ported to
similar machines. So if most machines use 8-bit bytes and most Ada
implementations use 8-bits for Stream_Element, is there really a practical
problem here?

I'd be interested to hear of a case where it did make a difference. I'm sure
a few exist, but I think its got to be a small percentage.

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/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:CnMj7.465$F4.1099@www.newsranger.com...
> That's another good point. I don't think there is, but its probably almost
> always going to be a reasonable assumption that Stream_Element'size is
evenly
> divisiable by Storage_Unit'size. It would be nice if this were in the
standard
> though. I can't see what good use anyone could make of the extra
flexiblity.
>