Ada policy

[Robert Dewar]

Zack Weinberg wrote:

> And the C language seems to cater more for portability across
> different implementations, too (with conditional compilation and the
> like).

Actually the point in Ada is that you don't need to "cater for
portability across different implementations", since it is perfectly
practical to write in completely standard portable Ada. In C, you
can't help running into portability issues because fundamental
definitions like the characteristics of int are implementation
dependent, and so you are forced to mess with conditional
compilation. When writing portable Ada, you would of course
completely avoid the use of the type Integer (which is what
corresponds to int), since you don't need to use these built
in integer types when you can define your own.