Re: Commercial C To Ada 95 compiler

[Fraser Wilson <newsfraser@blancolioni.org>]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> writes:

>   This will still compile.    The point is that someone said this
>   kind of thing would be rejected as an error by an Ada compiler.
>   It is not rejected by every compiler, even though some compilers
>   might provide a warning.

True.  On the other hand, everybody iterates through arrays with a for
loop over the range, an option not available in C.  I think this is
idiom one of the key wins for Ada: no range checking required, no
performance penalty, and no chance of a run time exception.

I expect that detecting this as a special case in a C to Ada compiler
would not be excessively difficult, assuming the array bounds were
available somewhere (though recognising the extra length argument to
an array handling function would be tricky).

cheers,
Fraser.