What's the URL for Ada-comment?

-- 
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com


"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:10160jcm6ma1acf@corp.supernews.com...
> "Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
> news:401272E3.4040506@noplace.com...
> ...
> > Oh sure. They are better than a sharp stick in the eye and if you have
> > to  control representation, they're an elegant solution. But they are
> > still "Butt Ugly" in the sense that the instant you use one, you can't
> > promise that the code will work *anywhere* except on the one
> > compiler/target where you built it.
>
> There is hardly any (useful) code that will work *anywhere*. Most existing
> free Ada code won't run on Janus/Ada out of the box because Integer is
> 16-bit -- and thus a lot of operations overflow. (Of course, there's no
> problem with proper type declarations, but those are rare.) And a lot of
> code is dependent in some way on the target - for GUI or output devices or
> whatever. Certainly adding a rep. clause has little effect on that.
> Especially if your world view pretty much starts and ends with PC hardware
> (as mine does practically).
>
> We build Claw from the ground up with the intent of making it portable to
> every Windows compiler -- yet there a quite a few differences that we have
> to deal with. So rep. clauses don't bother me; it is extremely rare that
> they would make code less portable than it already is.
>
> > As for submitting something to the ARG? I'll leave that to the language
> > lawyers. They'll come up with far better proposals than I could ever
> > write - so long as they think the idea might be a good one.
>
> The language lawyers are unlikely to even pay any attention to it unless
you
> submit a worked out change request. We have enough such requests that we
> certainly aren't looking for more!
>
> I view this is list pretty much as what Robert Dewar called a "chat
list" -
> a place where people gripe a lot, turn molehills into mountains (and vice
> versa), and you can't gauge much of anything by the conversations here. I
> read this list mainly as part of my work for one of my other hats
(webmaster
> at adaic.org) -- I'm trolling for newsworthy items. There have been
> occassional ideas where I got excited enough to propose something to the
ARG
> ("private with" is the one that comes to mind), but these days I feel
> swamped enough that it would have to be a stupendous idea before I'd make
> more work for myself.
>
> So, if you want something done, you need to take action to make a proposal
> on Ada-Comment. It certainly doesn't need to be perfect - and even if it
is,
> the ARG would change it all around before standardizing it - but if no one
> asks, it's very unlikely that the topic would even come up. Griping here
may
> feel good, but it has virtually no impact on the future of Ada.
>
>                           Randy.
>
>
>
>  I'm just the
> > end-user of Ada - a customer - expressing what he thinks would make the
> > language more usable on a day-to-day level. We're a dwindling herd, so
> > maybe those opinions ought to get some attention by the people who make
> > and sell Ada. Hope springs eternal! :-)
>
>
>