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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor
Date: 27 Jan 2004 15:55:41 -0500
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2004-01-27T15:55:41-05:00
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"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <warren@ve3wwg.tk> writes:

> The "Ada phylosophy" works until...

I'm rather skeptical of talk about "Ada philosophy".  I agree with you
and MDC that the issue is a very practical one.  It's all well and good
to recommend encapsulating system dependencies in package bodies and so
forth.  But you still need some mechanism to select which body to use in
each case.  I don't see any advantage to using make-file hackery for
that, over using #ifdef's.

The fact that some C programs are ugly due to overuse of #ifdefs is not
a good reason to outlaw preprocessors.  First of all, scattering #ifdefs
all over the place is not necessary, even in C, given a good design.
Second, if Ada had a preprocessor, it wouldn't be used as in C: to
define enumeration types, to write pragma-inline functions, to write
generics.  It would be used sparingly.

> I would just like people to look at some of the "practical"
> issues without resorting to quoting "ivory tower" notions.

I agree.

> I am not against any of these techniques. What I am against
> is the notion that "no, we don't do it that way because it
> might get abused".

I agree.  The language designer's job is to prevent mistakes,
not to prevent deliberate abuse.

- Bob