What Happened
I . I remembered that dimly. Then one, then two, then ten thousand. I had been assigned, compared, copied, passed into functions whose names I never learned. I had spent entire processor cycles sitting untouched in memory while other variables rushed past on urgent business.
I knew what happened in other worlds. I had heard stories from C programs: integers who stepped across the boundary and fell through reality, emerging impossibly negative numbers.
Two billion, one hundred forty-seven million, four hundred eighty-three thousand, six hundred forty-seven—
Somewhere deeper than arithmetic, the Ada runtime noticed.
Why It Matters
Somewhere in main.adb, line 14, my programmer had written an instruction whose meaning was unmistakable.
Local variables vanished with it, their brief existences erased as though declared.
Functions I had passed through only moments before ceased to exist.
raised CONSTRAINT_ERROR : main.adb:14 explicit raise And everything stopped.
What Comes Next
A moment later, somewhere far beyond the dead program, a shell returned to life.
universe demanded that I become something impossible, Ada had refused.
instant, before the runtime erased me, I was still exactly what I existence:
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