Chapter 7: Portability - TOC - 7.6 REPRESENTATION CLAUSES AND IMPLEMENTATION-DEPENDENT FEATURES

7.6.9 Run-Time Dependencies

guideline

Avoid the direct invocation of or implicit dependence upon an underlying host operating system or Ada run-time support system, except where the interface is explicitly defined in the language (e.g., Annex C or D of the Ada Reference Manual [1995]).

Use standard bindings and the package Ada.Command_Line when you need to invoke the underlying run-time support system.

Use features defined in the Annexes rather than vendor-defined features.

rationale

Features of an implementation not specified in the Ada Reference Manual (1995) will usually differ between implementations. Specific implementation-dependent features are not likely to be provided in other implementations. In addition to the mandatory predefined language environment, the annexes define various packages, attributes, and pragmas to standardize implementation-dependent features for several specialized domains. You enhance portability when you use the features declared in the packages in the Annexes because you can port your program to other vendor environments that implement the same Annexes you have used. Even if a majority of vendors eventually provide similar features, they are unlikely to have identical formulations. Indeed, different vendors may use the same formulation for (semantically) entirely different features.

When coding, try to avoid depending on the underlying operating system. Consider the consequences of including system calls in a program on a host development system. If these calls are not flagged for removal and replacement, the program could go through development and testing only to be unusable when moved to a target environment that lacks the facilities provided by those system calls on the host.

Guideline 7.1.5 discusses the use of the package Ada.Command_Line. If an Ada environment implements a standard binding to operating system services, such as POSIX/Ada, and you write POSIX-compliant calls, your program should be portable across more systems.

exceptions

In real-time, embedded systems, making calls to low-level support system facilities may often be unavoidable. Isolating the uses of these facilities may be too difficult. Comment them as you would machine code inserts (see Guideline 7.6.3); they are, in a sense, instructions for the virtual machine provided by the support system. When isolating the uses of these features, provide an interface for the rest of your program to use, which can be ported through replacement of the interface's implementation.