Re: Ada Core Technologies announces GNATCOM

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> Indeed the quoted paragraph above is EXACTLY the confusion
> that caused this unsupportable design of the C_Pass_By_COpy
> pragma in the first place.

I don't recall it that way.  I think the reasoning was that when people
conceptually want to pass a struct in C, they usually pass a pointer to
it, so we should mimic that.  Flawed reasoning, I admit.  But surely you
don't think that the designers of Ada 9X were confused about the
difference between passing by reference, versus passing the address of a
copy?!

> Unfortunately, there is nothing much we can do at this stage
> except live with a little mess here, luckily cases where C
> programmers pass records as parameters (as opposed to pointers
> to records) are rare.

Yes.  Somehow, "rare" became "nonexistent, so don't worry about it."
*That* was the mistake.

- Bob