Re: Strict aliasing, is it OK?

[Robert Eachus <rieachus@comcast.net>]

On Tuesday, July 4, 2017 at 7:40:31 PM UTC-4, Victor Porton wrote:
> 
> But my question about my old code remains valid. Is that old code erroneous 
> or isn't?

You are probably too new to Ada to remember Norm Cohen preaching about reasoning from erroneousness.

But to limit myself to the case at hand:  Is your code erroneous?  Can't tell from the excerpts provided, but who cares?  The GNAT compiler is nicely telling you that use of C_Raptor_Parser_Get_Description may lead to erroneousness, and offering a nice way to tell the compiler that reasoning from erroneousness here is bad, and must not be done.

From a software engineering standpoint, the best answer is fix the code now, so the issue doesn't come up. The second best is to put in the pragma so that even if your program is fine, some maintenance change won't cause erroneousness and then the compiler commit evil by reasoning either from erroneousness, or from assuming the lack of it.