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From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How can I get this data into the .data section of the binary?
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 12:55:47 +0300
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On 2020-06-18 5:55, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com> wrote in message
> news:rcaicd$ifh$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> ...
>> According to 10.2.1 it should be possible:
>>
>>    is important that programs be able to declare data structures that
>> are link-time initialized with aggregates, string_literals, and
>> concatenations thereof. etc.


    [snip]

> The better question is why you care?


    [snip]

> (The situation can be different on a bare machine, of course.)


As I've posted in this thread two cases where I have needed things like 
this, here are my reasons for needing them, just for the record.

For background, both cases occurred in bare-machine systems in which the 
entire SW is stored in EEPROM and is then entirely copied to RAM for 
execution, _including_ the code and read-only (constant) data.

For my case of the large constant array, we needed to save RAM space, 
and did not want to spend RAM _both_ for the elaboration code that 
initialized the array (larger than the array itself) and for the array. 
If we had not discovered the positional-association method, we would 
have had to define the array in assembly language, which would have 
required _many_ Export pragmas in the Ada source.

For my case of the constant version-identifier string, the customer 
required the executable SW image (in EEPROM) to contain a version 
identifier at a fixed address. This is a very common requirement in this 
domain. Of course it can be implemented in many ways (directly in the 
linker command script, for example), but I was pleased to be able to do 
it in Ada with the Linker_Section pragma.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .