Re: Beware: Rep spec on an enumeration type causes code explosion

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

Joe said

<<I suppose that the writers of Ada95 compilers know where they struggled
with Ada95, as well as Ada83 before it.  If it was hard for them to write,
it will likely generate lots of code.
>>

Not necessarily, I don't see any real relationship between difficulty
of implementation and amount of code generated. For example, private
types remain one of the most difficult areas of Ada 95 to implement
correctly (Tuck once said that the hard parts of Ada 95 from an
implementors point of view all come from Ada 83 :-) Yet private types
of course generate no code at all in most cases.

Similarly, generics are very hard to get right, but this does not mean
that lots of unnecessary code is generated.

On the other hand, most (but not all) of the processing for enumeration
types with holes is quite straightforward, but surprised Joe with the
amount of code generated (actually that might not be quite fair, from the
sound of it, it could be the case that the compiler was in that case
generating more code than is justified).