Attributes 'Version and 'Body_Version

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

On my way to playing around with something else, I started looking at the
results of the attributes 'Version and 'Body_Version with Gnat 3.13p on
WinNT. They appear to be intended for distributed systems, but could
potentially be useful within any system that uses someone's library of
stuff - a means of verifying that any assumed behavior from a given version
is still valid. Or, for example, a means of recording the version of a
package that produced some particular output so that on input, version
differences can be accommodated.

Looking at the strings from a particular package (a generic instantiatiation
at that) I see a pair of strings that look like: "2daafe2a" (spec)
"21adf138" (body) I didn't encounter anything in the ARM indicating what the
format of the string should be nor did I see anything in the GNAT documents
that explained how to interpret the string. Obviously, this is going to be
system dependent, but if you want to do anything more than say "This version
isn't the one I remember" you need to know how to interpret the string. Has
anybody used this before and possibly have some insight? Thanks.

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/