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From: Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Representation clauses for base-64 encoding
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:00:15 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2011-12-22T16:00:15+00:00
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Hello,

On 2011-12-22, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote:
> On 22.12.11 13:24, Niklas Holsti wrote:
>
>> This defines a nice Ada representation of the six-bit codes. But this
>> was not Natasha's question;
>
> You are quite right, sorry.
>
> Stubbornly, I'd like to mumble, though, that the very
> notion of representation is at odds with portability.

However here representation is not used as a notion, only as a tool:
using explicit shifts and masks, it is possible to write portable Ada
that performs the correct split of 3 octets on any platform.

The previous argument was that representation clauses allow more
readable code, which I'm inclined to believe. But is it really necessary
to give up portability for the sake of readability?

(I would answer "no" in that particular case, since base-64 splitting is
such a very simple and well-known operation)


Natasha