Re: Reading environment variables in ADA?

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <6vdgvv$2h3$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> dewarr@my-dejanews.com writes:

 > Note that if you declare a *constant* aliased string, then a good compiler
 > should not even allocate stack space, but instead allocate the constant
 > statically. This is what GNAT does, and I believe that at least some other
 > Ada compilers do this same optimization.

   Sorry, I have to recommend against this.  It is a constant to YOU,
but when it is passed to the C code, it is not.  I have found bugs in
both X windows and Solaris where the string is not actually changed,
but it is written to!  So if you pass a pointer to a string in the
code, you get a fault when the write occurs.  (Actually I suspect that
the terminating nul is rewritten.)

   (Don't ask me how these bugs occured, or why, and yes AFAIK, the
ones I have found have been fixed.  But it leads me to believe that
there are others.)
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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