Re: Ada9X Features

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <3550l2$8o7@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu>,
Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Mike, you are wrong about Fortran and conformant arrays, Fortran does
>NOT have this feature, at least not in anything like the form of ISO
>Pascal. Arrays in Fortran are passed by address only, and bounds information
>is not passed (note I am talking up through 77 here, who knows what they
>have wrought in 90 -- well probbaly some reader of this group does :-)
>
Yes, I was speaking in rather general terms. The point was that because
Fortran arrays are passed by address, one could write array declarations
in subprograms using (if my syntax is right) asterisks in place of
the dimensions. You're right that the bounds are not passed, and
must therefore be passed as extra parameters. 

Excuse the looseness; I didn't mean to get the discussion off track.
The point was that - even with Pascal, a relatively simple language,
it was rather difficult to reach a consensus in certain areas, and
in the end there were _two_ consensuses (consensi?), not one.

This was in response to the thread on "Ada 9X is too big - but please
don't take _my_ features out." People speak about standards as though
they could be handed down from Olympus, and often don't understand
just how much horse-trading and how many constituencies have to be
satisfied.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
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