Re: Surprise in array concatenation

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<adaworks@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:zSFTe.4078$wk6.1150@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...
> I recall a project where an Ada newbie, having learned about enumerated
> types, created one enumerated type that was three pages long.  That is,
> the number of values in the type was so great that it took three pages
> of 11 X 14 standard printer paper to contain it.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

The intermediate code definition for Janus/Ada includes an enumeration of
300 or so operations. The definition covers several pages (it has comments).
That's used as the discriminant on a giant variant record that covers more
than 6 pages. No newbies here. :-)

It's very useful for this to be an enumeration; when new operations are
added, the case statements in the optimizer and elsewhere fail to compile
until they've been updated with the new operations. That's a short term
pain, but it avoids a lot of problems in the long run (because the
operations were added considering impacts, rather than either forgotten or
defaulted to something that's likely to be wrong).

And, yes, Bob, it's not unusual to make arrays of (parts) of this type.

                    Randy.