Re: Ada95 Streams Question

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Bob Duff said

"    2. Solving the problem of heterogeneous is beyond the scope of the
       annex, but we don't want to get in the way of supporting
       heterogeneous systems.  We hope compiler writers will address
       those issues, and who knows, maybe that support will become
       standard someday.  Thus, the DS annex should not do anything that
       *prevents* its use in heterogeneous systems."

In fact there is nothing in the annex that is in any way relevant to the
homgenous vs hetergenous distribution issue, except for the recommendation
that the default stream representation of primitive data types correspond
to their memory representation, and that is only a recommendation, which
is simply clearly inappropriate for a hetergenous implementation (the
whole point of implementation advice is that it is advice, you ignore it
if it is inappropriate to your implementation).

Sure there are additional implementation problems to be solved in the
hetergenous case, but these are implementation issues, not language issues.