Re: Real Time IO routines answering Simon Wright part 2

On Oct 30, 9:35 am, a...@xxxxxxxx (anon) wrote:

-- Where did I get the information that IMAGE should be use for
-- debugging only? A few Ada conferences back in the early to
-- mid 1990's dealing with Ada programming and debugging
-- techniques.

To be precise, that should be called "opinion", not "information".
OK, so I wasn't at the conferences you mention, so I really don't know
how this "information" was presented or what the context was. There
may have been reasons for discouraging its use---the secondary stack
may be one reason; another possible reason is that less-experienced
programmers were prone to misuse 'Image. Or it could have been due to
efficiency concerns with passing unconstrained arrays around. Or it
could have just been someone's personal idea about what Ada was
"supposed" to be. Of course, there is no shortage of people who have
difficulty distinguishing their own opinions from factual
information.

If the "information" was that there was a consensus in the Ada
community that 'Image was to be avoided, maybe that was true---I don't
know---but on the other hand, I suspect that if it were true then
'Image wouldn't have been expanded. In Ada 83, you could not use
'Image on floating or fixed-point types; in Ada 95, this capability
was added. It would seem a little odd for those who decided on what
would be added to Ada 95---who are about as far from "newbie" as you
can get---to add this feature if there was a consensus that 'Image was
a bad thing. Also, the responses on this thread (from people with a
lot of Ada experience) seem to indicate that there is no such
consensus.

Anyway, I can imagine that 'Image may be misused sometimes, and that
some people felt it should be discouraged. But it's a big jump to go
from there to the absolute statements you made that Ada purists
"NEVER" use it, or that it is never used except for debugging, or that
practically only newbies use it. Those statements are still nonsense.

-- Adam


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