Re: Porting ADA source

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:40FD0932.5080604@noplace.com...
...
> But the mission is to take code body X and get it from its existing
> platform onto another - not redesign the system. Time spent reorganizing
> the code and setting up a build process does not directly move that
> mission forward. Hence, it would be nice to get some kind of quick and
> dirty fix that doesn't mean spending excessive time reworking the
> existing product. A conditional compilation directive can be that sort
> of fix. Its just that it is viewed dimly as a sub-optimal formal
> technique. Oh well....

If it is a long-lived system (and this one appears to be) a quick and dirty
solution simply sets the developers up for many years of pain in
maintenance. It's better to do it right the first time (or, as in this
case - a very common one, the second time).

Case in point: when we ported Janus/Ada to the U2200 computers, we had to
change a lot of assumptions about the sizes of things. (We had of course
assumed character = byte = 8 bits, and of the U2200 was a 36-bit word
machine.) Rather than simply coding a different set of assumptions, we
decided to restructure everything so that the compiler depended on a small
set of packages that encoded host and target information. That eliminated
future redos for similar issues. I'm sure the customer would have been
happier in the short run if we hadn't restructured everything, but it meant
that virtually all bug fixes only needed to be made once -- a huge time
savings in the long run.

                             Randy.