Alexis Ada Reference Manual

Annex F - Information Systems (normative)

1 {information systems} This Annex provides a set of facilities relevant to Information Systems programming. These fall into several categories:

• 2 an attribute definition clause specifying Machine_Radix for a decimal subtype;
• 3 the package Decimal, which declares a set of constants defining the implementation's capacity for decimal types, and a generic procedure for decimal division; and
• 4/2 the child packages Text_IO.Editing, Wide_Text_IO.Editing, and Wide_Wide_Text_IO.Editing, which support formatted and localized output of decimal data, based on “picture String” values. 

5/2 See also: §3.5.9, “Fixed Point Types”; §3.5.10, “Operations of Fixed Point Types”; §4.6, “Type Conversions”; §13.3, “Operational and Representation Attributes”; §A.10.9, “Input-Output for Real Types”; §B.3, “Interfacing with C and C++”; §B.4, “Interfacing with COBOL”; Annex §G, “Numerics”.

6 The character and string handling packages in Annex §A, “Predefined Language Environment” are also relevant for Information Systems. 

Implementation Advice

7 If COBOL (respectively, C) is widely supported in the target environment, implementations supporting the Information Systems Annex should provide the child package Interfaces.COBOL (respectively, Interfaces.C) specified in Annex §B and should support a convention_identifier of COBOL (respectively, C) in the interfacing pragmas (see Annex §B), thus allowing Ada programs to interface with programs written in that language. 

7.a/2 Implementation Advice: If COBOL (respectively, C) is supported in the target environment, then interfacing to COBOL (respectively, C) should be supported as specified in Annex §B.

Extensions to Ada 83

7.b {extensions to Ada 83} This Annex is new to Ada 95. 

Wording Changes from Ada 95

7.c/2 Added a mention of Wide_Wide_Text_IO.Editing, part of the support for 32-bit characters.