Re: basic basic ada question

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:32:45 -0400, Robert A Duff wrote:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> 
>> Well, this is a more general issue than just command line arguments. As for
>> me I consider the very idea of tokenizing as harmful. It is unfortunate
>> that both C and Ada follow a wrong concept in the command line interface.
>> Tokenizing is just wasting resources. It is also useless when you have
>> delimiters other than spaces, keyed arguments, or some nested structure. I
>> prefer always to parse the original source: the command line as a whole. I
>> never copy anything.
> 
> How?  On many operating systems, the "shell" or whatever will do all
> kinds of command-line parsing before you can get your hands on it.  On
> Unix, it even expands wildcards (a rather bad design, IMHO).

Surely depends on OS. In Windows there is GetCommandLine.

I didn't criticise design of Ada.Command_Line, rather I did the idea of
tokenizing, when the programmer acts like a hamster storing things here and
there. Most of them he will never find again. I don't know whether
"hamster" programming stems from UNIX or just influenced it. (:-))

As for Ada.Command_Line, it could provide function Command return String;
with a remark that depending on the OS its result might be not very
authentic. [Neither Argument's result is.]

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de