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Subject: Re: Help with designing data structure for novice Ada programmer
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On 1/8/22 9:36 PM, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Aleksy Grabowski <hurufu@gmail.com> writes:
>> I'm experienced embedded C developer and I've started 2 years ago an
>> implementation of one of the specifications kind of popular in the
>> payment industry. I also hope to make it open source one day.
> 
> Can you say what specification it is?
> 
>> have to guarantee consistency of a huge configurable data structure,
>> that can be changed by an entity which in theory may not be in my
>> control. And adding all checks quickly became nightmarish and then I've
>> found an Ada language.
> 
> It sounds like you waht to define a datatype for this structure, with
> access and update procedures (OOP is not necessary but it's the same
> idea) that make sure all the rules are followed.  Is there more to it
> than that?
> 
> Ada sounds like a reasonable choice, C sounds terrible, other
> possibilities depend on the hardware and software environment.  Would
> this have to run on a smart card cpu or anything like that?

   Having just implemented a small app using interlinked
   doubly-linked lists that are allocated on demand, Ada
   can do at least that much quite easily and cleanly without
   any OOP BS. "Records"/"Structs" are much as in Pascal,
   but they don't call pointers "pointers"  :-)

   You DO have to bring in a special proc to FREE memory allocated
   on the heap however. Kinda weird - you'd think making and freeing
   would naturally be implemented together. This "free()" is very
   type-specific, multiple incarnation of the proc will be needed
   if you have multiple kinds of records to free.

   The other (extensive) requirements ... I'll leave that to the
   more experienced.

   (am I off one level here ?)