Re: How do functions return unbounded arrays?

[Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org>]

johnherro@aol.com (John Herro) writes:

> > Are there Ada programs that cause a heap
> > overflow just by calling "&" in a long loop?
> 
> That question I can answer definitely.  The following program raises
> Storage_Error on my machine when compiled with Open Ada (an Ada 83
> compiler).  [program example snipped]

This is hardly a definate answer.  All it proves is that in one Ada 83
implementation, storage error gets raised.

We could probably make the storage error go away by declaring the string
in a nested block:

procedure Test is
begin
   for L in Long_Integer range
        10_000_000 .. 99_999_998 loop

      declare
         S : constant String :=
           Long_Integer'Image(L) &
           Long_Integer'Image(L + 1);
      begin
         null;
      end;

   end loop;
end Test;

I think the memory will get cleaned up when the frame terminates (that
is, every pass through the loop), and therefore storage_error won't
happen.