Re: 64-bit integers in Ada

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) wrote in message news:<PG2KS5+doDWm@eisner.encompasserve.org>...
> Let's cure _all_ such individuals, by standardizing on 
> 4096 bits as the size for Standard.Integer :-)

Actually I think the rule of avoiding using explicit
references to Integer is pretty well established. yes,
you see occasional shops that violate this rule, but not
many (in our experience of seeing code from hundreds of
serious projects using Ada).

Actually the above would almost warrant presentation without a smiley
(as a way of effectively removing the
injudicious Standard.Integer type from the language if
it were not for the darned cross contamination with
type String.

What I would have done for the Ada design is to have only
*one* predefined type which would be called something like

   type String_Index is range 1 .. Implementation_Defined;

and leave all other integer types out of standard. I think
that would have worked better, and people would not have
"misused" String_Index as they occasionally misuse Integer.

I feel differently about Float incidentally, I think it is
reasonable to have predefined Float and Long_Float types.
It is simply asking too much for all useful fpt library
packages to be generic since they can't easily speak to
one another if you do that.