Re: win32ada design question/problem

[stt@houdini.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

dennison@telepath.com wrote:

: ...
: I'm trying to write some portable bindings to the Zlib compression library
: right now, and have found myself reverting to just that. But are there
: portability issues associated with System.Address? My reading of 13.7 is that
: System.Address does not nessecarily map to a C pointer, and that
: System.Null_Address does not nessecarily map to a C null pointer.

: The "portable" alternative we are given is Interfaces.C.Pointers. But its a
: real pain to use for routines where the input object could be any type.

I would not worry about the portability of System.Address.
Theoretically it might be a problem, but practically,
I doubt very much whether you will run into any problems
on hosts and targets you care about.

System.Null_Address is perhaps slightly more likely to cause
portability problems, though still I suspect you are in the
0.01% case.  You could always define your own "C_Null" in some
common target-specific package, with the 99.99% reusable
default definition of System.Null_Address.

: --
: T.E.D.

--
-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
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