From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Gripe about Ada, rep specs that won't. Date: 1996/03/26 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 144186929 references: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-03-26T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Bob said: "OK, fair enough. I don't really see how packing 7 bits into 8 is "as tightly as possible" -- it seems to me 7 bits in 7 bits is tighter. But the end result is: people don't agree on what the paragraph means, so let the ARG decide." But if 7 bits are required to generate a 'Size of 7, which is reasonable, then the same requirement would require a record with 1023 booleans to have a 'Size of 1023, which is NOT reasonable, since large objects like this are reaonably rounded to a storage unit boundary. In Ada 83, the programmer had control in the 7 bit case by explicitly setting the size to 7. This is absolutely standard coding practice in most large applications we see, the programmer is definitely interested in the value of the size. However, the Ada 95 RM does not, as we have discussed, require any rep clauses for 'Size of records to be accepted. P.S. It is always worth a disclaimer that this discussion is still largely theoretical. GNAT and most other Ada 95 compilers will fully implement the rep clauses that are needed. I would define this set as Those that are simply mapped to the hardware + Those that are widely used in existing code + Those that soeone is willing to pay for