Re: Ada -vs- GNAT

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Steve Doiel" <nospam_steved94@attbi.com> wrote in message news:<sXCH8.103053$Po6.225647@rwcrnsc52.ops.asp.att.net>...

> Personally I find the introduction of attributes and pragmas that are not
> essential to be undesirable.

Well of course essential is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but
if you
want to be sure of not using any non-standard pragmas you can use

pragma Restrictions (No_Implementation_Pragmas);

and/or

pragma Restrictions (No_Implementation_Attributes);

All Ada compilers introduce implementation pragmas and attributes.
Furthermore
there are of course dozens of oher ways in which the behavior of code
can be
implementation dependent (see annex M of the standard).

Note that the restrictions above are also implementation dependent,
but the
ARG has recommended that these be added to the language (along with
some other
attributes and pragmas introduced by GNAT, including Unsuppress).

By the way, you were lucky that you could get around the use of
Unrestricted_Access. When applied to procedures, this provides very
important (essential?) capabilities that are just not obtainable
easily any other way (it is a real shame that the language got a bit
crippled here by concerns of specific vendors about transitioning
their existing Ada 83 compilers).