Re: Announce: Grace project site operational

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

IIRC, there was XD-Ada targeted to the Mil-Std-1750a and its Integer was 16
bits. This was Ada83 and, on that hardware, it didn't make much sense to do
anything else anyway. Of course, this was an embedded application where
dynamic allocation was undesirable and the hardware only had 64k words of
memory anyway, so you probably wouldn't have cared much if the count
returned was only 16 bits.

However, I see your point. The Lists package could conceivably define its
own List_Element_Count type (with the customary Ada style "implementation
defined" we see in lots of the Ada packages now. :-) to guarantee it had
sufficient size for most uses. That might make more sense than adding
another generic parameter and would be in keeping with the style of lots of
other standard Ada packages.

Of course, arguably, if a given implementation is only supporting 16 bit
integers, it is likely to be for a machine (like the 1750a) that may not
easily handle larger sizes and may not have the large memory needed to
support lists that would exceed the 32767 elements it could count anyway.
Its likely that you'd be working with a machine that had other practical
limits (like strings that can't get larger than 32767 characters because
they're indexed by Integers as well?) so would you really care? Its just
another implementation limit you have to work with - or modify the source
since you have it readily available.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:udlkuuac05v2c2@corp.supernews.com...
>
> Not necessarily. I know at least one Ada compiler that has type Integer
> as 16-bits on all targets (so all targets have the same memory layout).
>
> If you care about the range, always use a user-defined type. Certainly
> in this case, you'll need a type with a longer range than 32767.
>