W. Wesley Groleau x4923 wrote:

> Yes, I see that problem.  I thought you had said something about GNAT.  In

Yes I did try to use GNAT on the initial compilation so see if my idea
would
work.

> any case, as I said, the RM doesn't force them to support it.  *IF* those
> two things are equal, the RM ADVISES support, otherwise there's not even
> the advice.  So, you have several choices--unfortunately, all of them are
> potentially expensive, but upon an examination of your application, you
> MIGHT find that one or more of them is not too expensive.
>
> 1. gobs of money to vxworks (or to the Ada compiler vendor)
>    (Did VxWorks state that it would be gobs, or do they have a little known
>    easy way to rebuild the OS in the little-endian mode?)

Yes, kind of.  They quoted me something in the order of 3 - 6 man-weeks
at
$10K per man week.

> 2. some amount of money to tamper with VxWorks/gcc yourself.

Yes, however, since I am not VxWorks-internals aware this can be quite
dangerous for me to fiddle with their code.

> 3. change to gnat and tamper with that on your own.

I am not allowed, by my company, to respond on this one. Sorry.

> 4. get an Ada compiler that supports Annex E on both hosts and
>    spend some amount of time changing your code to use pragma Remote;

Worth looking into.  I am unfamiliar with Annex E at the moment.

> 5. Use re-specification of derived types.  This would also take some
>    amount of re-tooling.  Only you can say how much.  This is a technique

Lots of work here.  We are talking thousands of lines of code.

>    taught to me ten years ago when I was learning Ada 83, but I have since
>    met many Ada programmers that don't know about it.  (I don't recall
>    ever actually using it myself.)  Here is a partial example for
>    four-octet integers.  (I omitted the unchecked conversions, which
>    should be obvious):

I'll give your example a look over.

--
Chris Sparks