Re: simple question - how to emulate void * ?

[cpallen@nospam.com (Craig Allen)]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998 01:33:52, cpallen@nospam.com (Craig Allen) wrote:

> Well, yes, I'm new to ada, and coming from C.
> 

and the rest of the discussion...

I'd like to thank everyone for their suggestions.  It certainly has 
been a learning experience for me.  I am a little surprised that there
is so much to this problem.  I'm not opposed to doing things 'The 
Right Way', but a simple solution was what I was looking for, that's 
why I was looking for a replacement for (void *).

If anyone is still following this thread, I'd like to ask another 
question:

I've tried the suggestions given here, and failed miserably.  The 
culprit in all cases was the fact that I'm using an Ada83 compiler (no
choice, sorry...).  It doesn't support many of the things that were 
mentioned, like 

with System.(insert anything here)
for var'Address use othervar'Address

for this, I also tried 
for var use at othervar'Address

but my compiler seems to really expect a static address for the 
location.

Anyway, I've learned a lot, but am still stumped.  I'm currently 
giving up and hard coding a lot of 'user-level' information into the 
supposed library routine, thereby making it not reusable.  Exactly the
opposite of what I thought Ada would be better than C for.

I'm really not saying all of this to try to incite responses that 
wouldn't otherwise have been written, but I'm giving my experiences so
far.  If anyone has any ideas about the solution to this problem that 
will work in Ada83, I'm all ears!

Thanks again for the prior help.

-Craig Allen
Ada novice