Re: type declaration and storage requirements

["martin.m.dowie" <martin.m.dowie@ntlworld.com>]

"Dale Stanbrough" <dale@cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote in message
news:dale-09A130.10404303062002@its-aw-news.its.rmit.edu.au...
> In article <hfyK8.40339$wd3.6272305@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com>,
[snip]
> I'm not sure if i've got the wrong end of the stick here, but it seems
> to me that it -is- a language issue, because the Ada designers have
> deemed to put it -into- the language.

Sorry, could have been clearer. IDD's are language independent was
what I was driving at.


> You can argue about whether it is the right decision (and you seem to
> be arguing against that). I would disagree - for some languages it makes
> sense to go to the trouble to include this information, as it may make
> writing portable programs easier.

No - I totally want be be able to control underlying representation when I'm
defining messages that must go over particular interfaces (e.g. ethernet,
1553,
etc).

But for types that are solely for use to the internals of my program 99
times
out of a 100 I don't care, provided that I've defined my 'digits' or 'delta'
or
'ranges' correctly.

I will admit that I use record representations less and less as the years go
by
and just do explicit byte array => internal representations by hand (with
the
help of a few generics). I've always found this area to be one of the most
troublesome as far as portability goes...