[quietbritishjim]

> 2. Representation clauses almost entirely eliminate the need for the error-prone manual (de-)serialisation that's littered all over Linux driver code:

Do representation clauses let you specify endianess? From a quick glance at that link it didn't appear so. I would imagine that invalidates most use cases for them.

[LiamPowell]

You can specify endianness, but only over the entire record, not an individual field. The way it works is a little complicated: https://www.adacore.com/gems/gem-140-bridging-the-endianness...

[quietbritishjim]

Interesting, thank you. I think per-record is probably good enough for most applications, and less verbose than per-member. But it's not part of the language (that page calls it "implementation specific") and quite recent (that page is undated but references Ada 2012 so must be since then). It wouldn't have helped the Ada project I'm working on, which had an endianess crisis with serialisation a few decades ago.

[Jtsummers]

Ada 95 added bit ordering.

https://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/95rat/...

https://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/95lrm/...