Ada Reference Manual (Ada 2022)
Annex F
(normative)
Information Systems
This Annex provides a set of facilities relevant to Information Systems programming. These fall into several categories:
- an attribute definition clause specifying Machine_Radix for a decimal subtype;
- 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
- 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.
Other relevant facilities can be found in: 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”.
The character and string handling packages in Annex A, “Predefined Language Environment” are also relevant for Information Systems.
Implementation Advice
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) for the Convention aspect (see Annex B), thus allowing Ada programs to interface with programs written in that language.
