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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,38159b1b5557a2e7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-01-27 14:18:19 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!newsfeed2.dallas1.level3.net!news.level3.com!priapus.visi.com!orange.octanews.net!news.octanews.net!news-out.visi.com!petbe.visi.com!newspeer.monmouth.com!cyclone.bc.net!news.uunet.ca!nf3.bellglobal.com!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor References: <400D2150.6000705@noplace.com> <400E72F9.8060501@noplace.com> <100upo7ln5e3k59@corp.supernews.com> <400FC8E8.2040100@noplace.com> <_JSdna166JuxFo3dRVn-hg@comcast.com> <401115B7.5020205@noplace.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:04:02 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.223.163 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1075240989 198.96.223.163 (Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:03:09 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:03:09 EST Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4948 Date: 2004-01-27T17:04:02-05:00 List-Id: Georg Bauhaus wrote: > Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote: > : For example, you'd pretty much have to have a different package > : for every POSIX-like environment, because of changes like what > : was included in the stat(2) structure (and others). Worse, you'd > : have to matrix it out to the various releases of Linux, FreeBSD, > : NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, HPUX etc. You cannot hope to > : accommodate all of these differences by package names. > > Not throwing in everything, (though that adds combinations no > matter which method is chosen to deal with the variety), > the following works for me (and also in more complex arrangements). > I will have to make exactly two changes if I want to switch the > OS/POSIX combination: > > with OS; -- see next > procedure run is > > use OS.BSD; ... But this gets back to maintaining many mostly parallel pieces of code. For some projects, this is very incovenient. There I said it. I wish for more convenience to deal with portability. > : I get frustrated with the short sightedness of the "not invented > : here syndrome". But maybe, that is just me. ;-) > > Hm. Plan 9's C enviroment does well without #ifdefs, even though > it has to provide this environment for different architectures. How does this help the Ada scenario? I am not saying that some situations cannot be best addressed with separately maintained packages/bodies. But it is not the best solution for some projects that are very platform sensitive (see earlier posts for why). > This is reported to be confusing for those who have unfortunately > been told to use > > #if defined __THIS_HEADER__ > > in header files, as a replacement for a design that keeps things > separate so multiple inclusion does not occur. C header files are a mess. Ada packages are soooo different from C, that we don't need to even go there. However, there is a case to conditionally with a package, just as a C program has a case for conditionally #include-ing. I can't add to the plan9 case, since I've not dug too deep into it. Unless they change their copyright restrictions, I will not make any investment of my time there. -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://ve3wwg.tk