Information Systems
Author: JTC1/SC22/WG9/ARG, by Randall Brukardt, ARG Editor

Ada Reference Manual — Legal Information

# Annex F

## (normative)

# Information Systems

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This Annex provides a set of facilities relevant to Information Systems programming. These fall into several categories:
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- an attribute definition clause specifying Machine_Radix for a decimal subtype;

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- 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

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- 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.

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

#### Implementation Advice

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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.

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