Re: Trouble translating a C++ data-structure.

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

shark8 wrote:
> What do you mean by "top level posting"? 

New posting to comp.lang.ada, not a reply.

> Well, I'm aiming for it to be not only HIGHLY portable, but extremely modular/maintainable.

Which portions of GNAT are not “HIGHLY portable” for example?

On an entirely different topic in the 2nd half of the sentence above, the ultimate in “extreme modular”ity would be to remove all control-flow/looping/branching constructs from the core language, ‘reducing’ them to ‘mere’ libraries, as Alphard was pursuing in the 1970s.  Something similar could be done throughout other constructs in Ada, such as the specs, so that the core language is an extremely small language and Ada-as-we-know-it, Ada+Spark-as-we-know-it, Ada+ASIS-as-we-know-it, Ada+newFangledInnovations-yet-to-be-imagined, and so forth are •libraries•—not of subroutines & parameterized-types/generics, but of Ada-Reference-Manual semantics & syntax and so forth, much as Alphard at Carnegie Mellon University was envisioning back in the 1970s:  basically to back-apply more-modern concepts:  aspect-oriented programming (AOP) weavers on steroids.  Or in other words, what if the Ada Reference Manual was no longer English prose, but rather executable Alphard-esque code.  What if a stage of multi-stage programming was to compile the app's chosen weaving of Ada83 or Ada95 or Ada2012 or Ada+Spark or Ada+ASIS or Ada+somethingEvenMoreWow?  (Mary Shaw had a breakthrough in the making, but never finished it during the late 1970s, apparently because Greed/Red/Ada sucked all the air out of the room, leaving little budget/time/research-grants for Alphard.)  Now that truly would be the breakthrough for compiler front-ends that LLVM has been for compiler back-ends.  That would put Ada back in the driver's seat as the premier processor-native-machine-code compiled language, leap-frogging & eclipsing Clang as the perceived most-modern truly state-of-the-art among all the (open-source) compiler front-ends.  Plus, such multistage-programming modularity in the compiler front-end would unleash an explosion of new language evolution/extension in Ada (just when many people outside the Ada community think Ada is getting old & grey-haired needing to go to bed early each evening due to being out of energy each day).  It might even usher in an era of fervor for Ada unseen since the DoD chose Green over Red.

Or did you have something else in mind as “extreme modular”ity of an Ada front-end?