Re: Software Engineering News Brief

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

tmoran says

"  Extending the range of Year_Number with a compiler switch might or might
not be a good idea, but turning off constraint checking either locally
on calls to Split, Time_Of, "+", "-" etc with a Pragma, or globally with
a compiler switch, is what I had in mind.  (Obviously Split et al must be
coded to properly handle such shenanigans, but we're assuming here that
a vendor is specifically trying to allow extension of the usual range.)"


From bad to horrible :-)

The idea of encouraging people to write erroneous programs is truly a bad
one. Remember that pragma suppress does NOT, despite its name, promise
to suppress exceptions. It simply allows the compiler to assume that
the check in question will not be violated, i.e. that any program execution
containing a failure of the check is erroneous.

For a vendor to allow you to exceed the range of Year_Number in this manner
would to me be an extension of the language, and a highly undesirable one.

I will repeat my earlier position, the only thing that makes sense is to
have a separate package that provides an extended year range. if you really
want to get into the language extension business, you can have a switch
that substitutes this extended calendar for the regular one, but that
seems a poor choice to me, much better to just have a separate package
called Extended_Calendar, or somesuch.

(although I must say, I can't see this being at the top of any implementors
 priority list :-)