Re: Another problem with stream reading.

[Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <a7vceg$lto$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, "Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:
> Unsigned integers for Ada0y might be interesting, but I'm not sure what you
> would do with them that you can't already do with modular types. If you need
> a 32 bit unsigned that doesn't have the base type problem, you can get that
> with a modular type. Is it that one might want overflow & underflow rather
> than wraparound semantics? If that's the case, I'd think it would be nice to
> have numeric types that saturate as well.
> 
> One of Ada's strengths is that it can describe in detail the exact needs of
> a given data type. Perhaps adding unsigned integers (and math types that
> saturate) would add to that strength. Arguing that you can get there from
> here by just doing blah blah blah is interesting, but not necessarily
> compelling. Its always nice to have direct language support for a feature
> that is likely to see a lot of use.

What would be compelling is real-world of experience of how useful the
blah blah blah version has been, or the experimental version of GNAT.