Re: Thanks guys..my project and my many problems

[mheaney@on2.com (Matthew Heaney)]

Paul Gregory <pg16@bton.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<3E5A2381.21FD3F14@bton.ac.uk>...
> 
> My project is this
> 
> You are invited to design and implement a translation program which will
> take an English sentence and translate it into French (and optionally
> translate from French to English).

You could use Charles, which contains data structures that are exactly
suited to your problem.

package Translation_Tables is
   new Charles.Maps.Sorted.Strings.Unbounded 
     (Element_Type => Charles.Strings.Unbounded.Container_Type);

E2F : Translation_Tables.Container_Type;

Insert (E2F, "big", Element => To_Container ("grand"));
Insert (E2F, ...);

procedure Lookup (E : String) is
   I : constant Iterator_Type := Find (E2F, Key => E);
begin
   if I = Back (E2F) then
      --not found
   else
      declare
        F : Element_Subtype renames To_Access (I);  --no copy
        --or F : constant Element_Subtype := Element (I); --copy
      begin
        --do something with F
      end;
   end if;
end Lookup;

The string map above accepts a key comparison operator as a generic
formal subprogram, so you could plug one in that provides a
case-insensitive compare.

There's also a map version implemented as a hash table, and there's a
hash function provided for type String.  (The sorted version is
implemented as a red-black tree.)

I used the new Charles string container as the map element, but you
could just as easily use any other non-limited type, such as
Ada.Strings.Unbounded.  A string pointer would also suffice, too.

http://home.earthlink.net/~matthewjheaney/charles/

The most recent release occurred on 18 Feb 2003.

Drop me a line if you have any questions.

Matt