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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Quality systems (Was: Using Ada for device drivers? (Was: the
   Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died))
Date: 21 May 2003 11:29:12 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:

> Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> > The design team actually went back and forth several times between two
> > solutions: a kludgy "magic" package that supports unsigned types of
> > certain sizes, pretty much like C, and a first-class type with syntax
> > and relatively general semantics (including non-binary modulii).
> > I think perhaps the magic package was the better solution.
> 
> What about:
> 
> 1. arbitrary modulii without add, or, xor, not.

By "add", you mean "and"?

Shrug.  I don't like the whole concept of modular; I think it's more
readable to do the "mod" explicitly.  Except perhaps for low-level cases
where you're mimicing hardware and the like.

And I don't like the fact that in order to get one extra bit (e.g. a
range of 0..2**32-1 or 0..2**64-1) I have to use modular semantics,
in cases where I'm just counting things, so modular semantics is just
wrong.

> 2. predefined boolean array types with bit-wise and arithmetic operations, 
> packed, allowed for discriminants etc.

I would love to have discriminants whose type is array or record.
It's annoying to have to introduce pointers (and then make things
aliased) in order to pass an array as a parameter to a type.

- Bob