Re: How do you bitwise operations in Ada '83 and '95

[tmoran@acm.org]

>Why I use a modular type instead of a record with rep. clauses? More
>practical. (And I think safer, I think rec. rep. clauses are not as
>strongly required by the RM to be met by the implementation, which is
   If you really want to be portable to a compiler meeting the absolute
minimum standard, then you are, of course, doing your own 64 bit
arithmetic, since both Integer and System.Max_Binary_Modulus are only
required to be 16 bits.
   Ada is designed to be highly readable and to aid in creating correct
programs.  Surely a record rep clause, and then simple usage of its
components, is more readable, and more likely to be correct, and even more
likely to generate optimized code, than source code littered with complex
arithmetic expressions.
   When I used languages other than Ada, I thought of a compiler as a tool
to convert my source code to binary.  With Ada, though, I think of the
compiler as an assistant, doing the scut work (like shifting and masking
in this case) and watching to tell me of any obvious errors.  It's a
different world view.