Re: Ada.Strings.Fixed.Count raises Storage_Error

[rieachus@comcast.net]

On Friday, July 1, 2016 at 6:55:50 AM UTC-4, J-P. Rosen wrote:

> I don't remember anything like that.

Different hat. (Management)  When Ada (80) was new, it was just assumed that minicomputers and PCs would have a 16-bit Integer type.  Then it turned out that Ada compilers couldn't really fit in a machine with too limited an address space.  So those of us who worked for hardware companies had to do the soul searching about which hardware compilers needed to run on, and which targets could be included.  The choice between 16-bit and 32-bit Integer types was possibly just a symptom, but by 1984 it was pretty much in the rear view mirror.  No one really wanted to buy compilers where Integer was 16-bits, even for the (MIL STD) 1750A.
 
>                                       And there is no problem for
> generating correct code for a loop that spans over all values of a type,
> you just have to exit in the middle - without efficiency penalty.

You have a different definition of efficiency than I do.  On a modern processor I want to be able to execute tight loops in one clock cycle per iteration.  This usually requires three or more instructions that can be executed in parallel.  The efficient workaround is to have a single loop iteration before the actual loop code.  The better way is just to run the loop in a 64-bit register if that is an option. ;-)