Re: alias.c:nonoverlapping_component_refs_p

[Geert Bosch <bosch at gnat dot com>]

On Monday, December 3, 2001, at 09:04 , Richard Henderson wrote:

> Err.. why?  What can you do with a collapsed represenation that
> you can't do with the uncollapsed representation?  It's all
> compiler internals after all...

The issue is that the user can define representation clauses
that allow full control over the in-memory layout of types.
This means that we could have something like:

    type T (X, Y : Boolean) is record
       case X is
          when False => A : Float;
          when True  => B : Float;
          case Y is
             when False => C : Float;
             when True  => D : Float;
          end case;
       end case;
    end record;

    for T use record
       A at 0 range 0 .. 31;
       B at 8 range 0 .. 31;
       C at 4 range 0 .. 31;
       D at 4 range 0 .. 31;
       Y at 12 range 0 .. 7;
    end record;
    for T'Alignment use 16;
    pragma Pack (T);

And the final layout of the type is then (use -gnatR to see this):

    for T'Object_Size use 128;
    for T'Value_Size use 105;
    for T'Alignment use 16;
    for T use record
       X at 13 range  0 ..  0;
       Y at 12 range  0 ..  7;
       A at  0 range  0 .. 31;
       B at  8 range  0 .. 31;
       C at  4 range  0 .. 31;
       D at  4 range  0 .. 31;
    end record;

Complete control over representation is one of the main benefits of
Ada in the embedded market, as this allows easy modelling of hardware
interfaces. I don't think it would be feasible to model such arbitrary
representations using union's and structs.

   -Geert