Re: Refactoring and Ada

["Pat Rogers" <progers@classwide.com>]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:4519e058.0202080714.1bf916bb@posting.google.com...
> "Martin Dowie" <martin.dowie@nospam.baesystems.com> wrote in message
news:<3c639940@pull.gecm.com>...
> > How about removing the 'confirming enumeration rep specs' that
> > are no longer necessary in Ada95?
> >
> > e.g.
> > from:
> >
> >     type An_Enumeration is (Foo, Bar);
> >     for  An_Enumeration is (Foo => 0, Bar => 1);
>
> They weren't necessary in Ada 83 either were they?

The issue in Ada 83 was that one didn't know what the underlying representation
would actually be, and of course sometimes that mattered.  If you really wanted
to be sure of the correspondence then you had to write the clause and hope that
the compiler would recognize them as merely confirming (for the sake of
performance).

Supposedly DEC Ada did some optimizations that involved scaling the underlying
representation for use elsewhere but I never found out if it was true.

Priorities were the same way -- you had to specify all of them if you cared
about any of them, because there was no way of knowing what they would be
otherwise.

---
Patrick Rogers                       Consulting and Training in:
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