Re: Conditional types?

[tmoran@acm.org]

> the system you can safely assume it's passing either a float, an integer,
> or an unsigned 32 bit integer. Is there a way do this in Ada ...
There is clearly no way to do this in Ada or any other language.  A given
set of 32 bits could be a representation of any of the above.  If,
however, you know things like "if it's an integer, its between -100 ..
100" or "if it's a float it's > +1.0E7" then you can rule out certain
possibilities, and hopefully be left with exactly one remaining
possibility.  If you know "this is either a table of integers, most
of which are small in absolute value, or it's a table of floats,
with many non-zero bits to the right of the point", then you can
make a probabilistic guess based on Bayes Theorem.
Are you trying to decrypt an undocumented old tape or something?