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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Encapsulating Ada.Direct_IO
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:38:44 -0600
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen
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Date: 2010-11-18T12:38:44-06:00
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"AdaMagica" <christoph.grein@eurocopter.com> wrote in message 
news:946c87a9-208a-4206-b925-1c48ac621acd@a37g2000yqi.googlegroups.com...
>On 18 Nov., 02:16, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
>> ... For
>> instance, the Unisys U2200 (a 36-bit machine, with 9-bit bytes) used
>> Character'Size = 9. (It was great fun for the cross-compiler.)
>
>Huh. How then is Character defined there? Accoriding to RM A.1(35),
>Character has 256 positions, so Character'Size should be still 8.
>Of course stand-alone objects would have X'Size = 9.
>
>Note that Natural'Size = Integer'Size - 1.

I suppose you are right, but Ada 95 Type'Size has no important meaning. 
(It's a terrible definition, IMHO.) What matters is what AdaCore calls 
Type'Object_Size, and that is what I was referring to. (Typically, 
specifying Type'Size will have some effect on Type'Object_Size, but exactly 
what that is will vary depending on the target.)

You could, I suppose, have packed characters into 8-bits in an array, but 
the code to access them would have been unspeakably bad. And there would 
have been no reason to do so anyway, since files and streams are 
automatically converted when crossing into that machine's domain.

                                  Randy.