From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,28b389d4503cb555 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert A Duff Subject: Re: generic package dilemma Date: 1999/11/22 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 551708074 Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) References: <80u48b$ghr$1@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au> <3832e27f_1@news1.prserv.net> <3832E75D.5B1BA719@mail.com> <383319e8_4@news1.prserv.net> <3833F615.5AD7166C@mail.com> <383442e1_1@news1.prserv.net> <383510EA.9DFEE8B6@mail.com> <383569db_2@news1.prserv.net> <3835CF7A.5604C6A3@mail.com> <81bt4v$7cr$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-11-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar writes: > We have lots of cases of legacy code, particularly Verdix code, > where the programmers were, quite unknowingly relying on > non-portable behavior. It is very bad programming practice > to omit the pragmas (*). But without some help from the compiler, it's quite difficult to get them right. >... In one hard, we had one customer > with a large code who spent quite a bit of time running the > program and finding out one bug after another of omitted pragma > Elaborate's causing Program_Error. And maybe some of those Program_Errors happen inside tasks, where the default behavior is to silently kill the offending task? :-( > The story here is that basically we all agreed, but we also > agreed that trying to do this in a reasonably upwards compatible > manner was far from easy, and there simply was not enough time > available in the course of the Ada 95 design. I've thought about the problem a lot since 1995, and I have yet to come up with an upward compatible solution that is also "good" in all the other respects I'd like. - Bob