>Back in 1990, on the other hand, you wanted to strangle a language that made you ripple a domain change of 0..255 to 0..65535 through all the code by hand. EVERYWHERE.

If you're using hard coded constants instead of actual constants, you deserve the pain of changing it everywhere.

    Something_Lower  : constant := 0;
    Something_Higher : constant := 255;

    type Something is range Something_Lower .. Something_Higher;

Is how you do it. Changing the higher value to 65535 or anything else won't ripple.

Now, you do that in C, you've got hardcoded magic numbers all over the place and the compiler would've just silently compiled without warning. Have fund debugging that mess.