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Re: Ada policy


Scott Robert Ladd wrote:

However, I *can* comment on you understanding of C. Standard C (approved about five years ago) allows explicit declarations of integer sizes via the types in stdint.h. What you have encountered is either old code, or code written by people who are not aware of explicit type sizes.

Hmm .. I admit I am not an expert in C99 but I thought that stdint.h only required a very limited number of integer types, basically the powers of 2. So for example, there is no equivalent of

type R is range -2**23 .. 2**23-1;

which you expect to map into 24 bits on a 24 bit machine, and 36 bits on
a 36 bit machine.

Well let me go look it up ...

Hmm .. http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/stdint.h.html

seems to confirm my understanding, and actually that reference says it is
an extension of the C99 definition. What you would want is the type
int_least24_t, but that's not required to be defined. Am I
misunderstanding here?

This sort of "my language is better than your language" stuff is just plain silly, from any side of the issue.

Well I must say I was a bit surprised at the claim that it was arguable whether large applications could be practically written sticking strictly to ISO C (almost as surprising as Zack's claim that this was clearly impractical for Ada :-) I also found the idea that the only way to achieve portability is through use of conditional compilation to be surprising (I doubt this is true).



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