Re: Real Time IO routines answering Simon Wright part 2

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

I don't know why I'm masochistic enough to keep up this silly
argument, but...

On Oct 31, 1:08 pm, a...@anon.org (anon) wrote:

> And even though Ada has no real GUI in the specification it does have
> some. Rather the data is printed to the monitor or to a printer, the user
> (or teacher in the case of students) wants to be able to read the results
> without eye stain and in a timely fashion, that is, only the valid
> significant data. Which means that a programmer has to formatted
> their outputted data in a fashion that is informative but not too much
> that it causes confusion or stain in the user.
>
> And any 19 year programming vet. should knows this!!!

As a 30-plus-year programming veteran (19 years with Ada), I also know
that there are uses of 'Image that do not involve generating output
that a person will have to read for 8 hours a day; and, in fact, there
are uses of 'Image that don't involve generating output at all.  Say
you have an Integer variable File_ID (OK, define your own integer type
if you think only newbies would use the predefined Integer types), and
you want to use that as part of a file name that you're going to
create.  (You already know File_ID is nonnegative.)  What on earth
would be wrong with something like:

  Ada.Text_IO.Create (New_File, Ada.Text_IO.Out_File,
     Name => "nfz_" & Ada.Strings.Fixed.Trim (Integer'Image (File_ID),
Both)
                    & ".txt");

And what would be the point of a coding standard that forces you to
use, say, an instance of Integer_IO to build the file name rather than
using 'Image?

Yet your argument seems to be that, because there are inappropriate
uses of 'Image where you should be generating nicely formatted output
(something I've already acknowledged), that therefore the *only*
appropriate use of 'Image is for debugging.  Sorry, that's just silly.

                      -- Adam