Re: Passing Time via RCI

[Martin M Dowie <martin@dowie-cs.demon.co.uk>]

[snip]
> Yeah, Unchecked_Conversion is way down on my list of palatable
> solutions, though the network on which it'd be used is homogeneous.
> It just strikes me as almost an oversight that I have all these Time
> oriented utilities and I can't simply use them because there's no
> straightforward way to pass time around.  Another option I've got
> is to Split the time, type convert the Year, Month, etc into my
> own types, pass these, convert them back to Calendar.Year, etc.,
> and use Time_Of to rebuild the time.  And still...
[snip]

you mention that its a homogeneous network, but are all nodes on the
network going to be built using the same compiler (even down to
version)? even then, will your compiler assign the same space for
objects of a type exported from a shared package used in different
executables, or is it clever enough to choose different ones if this
would be faster execution within each executable?

we have a similar problem here. we are having to use our own time
package and do all those conversions you talked of, as our 'system real
time' can come from various sources and we have to synch our own
processors with it.

we're also constrained to using a common communications layer that sits
between us and the hardware and have to convert every message into an
array of bytes (this type being provided by the comms layer).

and on top of that we're on a hetrogeneous lan - and endianness also has
to be taken into account!! fun or what? :-)

i doubt there will be any other way of doing this over processor
interfaces other than defining your own (known represenation) types and
doing the conversions, as the standard time types are (with good reason)
deliberately implementation dependant.

if you think of something more ingeneous than all this, please let me
know!

p.s. our stuff is in Ada83, if it makes a difference.
-- 
Martin M Dowie