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- Path: cliffy.lfwc.lockheed.com!news
- From: Ken Garlington <GarlingtonKE@lfwc.lockheed.com>
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
- Date: Fri, 08 Mar 1996 12:02:02 +0000
- Organization: Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems
- Message-ID: <314021BA.3C57@lfwc.lockheed.com>
- References: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com> <4hmlca$a30@solutions.solon.com> <4hn50pINN4r8@keats.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> <313EE686.25CD@lfwc.lockheed.com> <4hnimb$elm@solutions.solon.com>
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-
- Peter Seebach wrote:
- > Ken Garlington <GarlingtonKE@lfwc.lockheed.com> wrote:
- > >Kazimir Kylheku wrote:
- > >> The only thing that bitfields are good for, portably, is optimizing the
- > >> storage of small signed or unsigned integers or flag sets, at some
- > >> computational expense.
- >
- > >Or, for example, implementing standard communications protocols used frequently
- > >in embedded systems, such as MIL-STD-1553.
- >
- > But then that's not "portable" - he did say "portably". Most things like that
- > can't be done portably anyway, so are not at issue.
-
- It can be _extremely_ portable -- between different compilers, between different
- CPUs, and between different systems. Can you find a case where it won't port?
- Probably. Nonetheless, it will port quite well in a lot of cases. And since it's
- a _standard_ protocol, it's worth writing in a portable manner. I don't know
- whether the C equivalent is portable or not, but I do know that the Ada approach
- to bitfields can port quite well. Part of that portability, of course, comes from
- the abilities of the language.
-
- These cases may not come up much in classic client/server programming, etc.
- but they come up often in embedded systems.
-