Re: Flags in Ada?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

The natural way of representing flags, i.e. words in which individual bits
have names and can be manipulated is to use pragma pack (some implementations
may require you to use a record representation clause, but this should not
be necessary, and is a weakness in the implementation).

   type Flag_Byte is record
      Flag1 : Boolean;
      ...
      Flag8 : Boolean;
   end record;

   for Flag_Byte'Size use 8;
   pragma Pack (Flag_Byte);

That should work fine (certainly works fine on GNAT, where it is equivalent
to the obviously corresponding C declaration with bit fields of length 1)

If sometimes you need to regard this as an integer, then you need to use
unchecked conversion -- quite an appropriate use of unchecked conversion,
since you are asking to view the same data as two totally different types.