22.2 The gnatpsta Utility Program

Many of the definitions in package Standard are implementation-dependent. However, the source of this package does not exist as an Ada source file, so these values cannot be determined by inspecting the source. They can be determined by examining in detail the coding of cstand.adb which creates the image of Standard in the compiler, but this is awkward and requires a great deal of internal knowledge about the system.

The gnatpsta utility is designed to deal with this situation. It is an Ada program that dynamically determines the values of all the relevant parameters in Standard, and prints them out in the form of an Ada source listing for Standard, displaying all the values of interest. This output is generated to stdout.

To determine the value of any parameter in package Standard, simply run gnatpsta with no qualifiers or arguments, and examine the output. This is preferable to consulting documentation, because you know that the values you are getting are the actual ones provided by the executing system.