RE: Endianness independance

[Lionel.DRAGHI@fr.thalesgroup.com]

| -----Message d'origine-----
| De: Marin David Condic [mailto:mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org]
...
| 
| Realistically, the answer is to assess the communications 
| mechanisms needed,
| establish a clearly defined protocol & representation and 
| then build your
| software to deal with that. Ada can be very good at handling the
| representation selected, but it really can't define the 
| representation for
| you.

I agree with this. 
What i am complaining about, is that you can't just rely on representation
clauses to have interoperability between the same code compiled on two
different platform, and exchanging data through a stream socket for exemple.
I think that the representation/size/alignment clauses could give enough
informations to the compiler to ensure interoperability (provided RM
modifications). 

Am i wrong? As said Amir Yantimirov:
"But including notion of endianess (as kind of storage specifier) 
in existent Ada type system seems impossible to me."

Note that Norman Cohen's paper do not address the whole interoperability
problem, he just propose a way to portably specify "a data layout". However,
this is, i think, the most difficult part of the job.

Lionel Draghi