Re: ada and robots

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

Richard said

<<This is perhaps a case where the casts in C are more portable.

If you write

        * ((volatile long *) some_address) |= some_expression;

it would be quite peculiar (and perhaps even be considered a bug) if the
compiler didn't respect the "long" type and generate the correspondingly
sized load and store instructions.
>>

I don't see this claim at all. The corresponding Ada code would be
identical semantically to the C code, and the same statement ("quite
peculiar .. perhaps even be considered a bug") would apply to the Ada.

But that was not the example, the example was where a single bit was flipped.

If we write   x &= 1;

in C where x is a volatile variable, there is nothing in the C language
that indicates whether we get

word load/store
byte load/store
bit set instruction (quite reasonable to expect on x86)


I think that the semantics of Ada and C are identical here. The advantage
of Ada is that it is a little more clear that you are playing low level
games -- in particular the quoted C code, in which the volatility is buried
in low level implementation, is undesirable.