Re: chopping Ada source that have preprocessor symbols in them

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

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"Pascal Obry" <pascal@obry.net> wrote in message 
news:511E64AB.8030805@obry.net...
> Le 15/02/2013 12:11, Georg Bauhaus a �crit :
>> What, twist Ada to meet GNAT requirements, or change the procedures
>> in the foreign organization?  :-) :-) :-)
>
> Well AFAIK the actual representation of an Ada source is outside of the
> Ada standard. So nothing to twist there :)

That's not really true anymore for Ada 2012: compilers are required to take 
source files represented in UTF-8 with a direct mapping to the characters 
described in the Standard. And the Standard definitely describes multiple 
units in a file. Of course, exactly the steps needed to support those source 
files isn't described, and it could be long.

I sympathize with Georg's problem, but the point the Stephen made is 
well-taken: if modifying a file containing multiple units causes too much 
recompilation, then you have to split the file into several units. 
Certainly, I do that occassionally for Janus/Ada development -- usually 
things compile fast enough that it doesn't matter -- but if it starts to 
become annoying, I don't blame my tools working as designed, I blame my own 
sub-optimal choice of organization.

(And the use of a preprocessor is always suboptimal. It's much better to 
have that managed as part of version control, by selecting files 
specifically for particular targets -- but I've never seen a version control 
system that does that properly -- they all assume the use of preprocessors. 
For RRS, I built a front-end that adds such structure to the versioning (CVS 
is the back-end), but it's pretty clunky and never was turned into a 
product.)

                                                      Randy.