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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Two ideas for the next Ada Standard
Date: 1996/09/05
Message-ID: <dewar.841911826@schonberg>#1/1
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references: <50aao3$3r88@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net> <dewar.841590835@schonberg>
 <322B5BB0.422E@joy.ericsson.se> <50gelc$2le@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
 <Dx5zH4.2zo@world.std.com> <50jk0f$krh@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-09-05T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Richard said

"Wearing my Lisp hat:  only because Ada doesn't actually support integers,
but a machine-dependent set of machine-dependent small bounded integers."

Actually that's not quite true, whether Ada supports arbitrary precision
integers is an implemention dependent issue.

Something that people don't know very well in Ada 95 is that there is a big
difference between integer'base and integer, which are quite different types.
The type integer'base has no constraints. An implementation is allowed, but
definitely NOT required to impose limits on the range of integers that
can be represented using this type.