Re: integer'image

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <29979@shamash.cdc.com> case@shamash.cdc.com (Steven V. Case) writes:
>I have encountered this situation frequently enough that I work around it
>by calling a subprogram to strip leading spaces.  I suspect that most of you
>have some sort of string manipulation package that you have either 
>developed or purchased.  I made sure that mine has support for removing 
>leading and trailing spaces (in addition to other operations).  Then when I
>want to get rid of the trailing space, I don't have to embed statements
>like INTEGER'IMAGE(I)(2..INTEGER'IMAGE(I)'LAST), but can use a statement
>such as REMOVE_LEADING_SPACES(FROM => INTEGER'IMAGE(I)).  This is probably
>more readable, therefore it won't 'gag a maggot'.  I suspect this is the
>general idea that Mr. Hoysch was suggesting when he said 'or a very simple
>routine if this is too hard on the eyes.'

Humbug! I hope the Ada9x team is reading this thread, to see the sort of
totally unnecessary grief is caused by what IMHO is a foolish nonuniformity
that's got to be nearly trivial to fix.

Since 'image will need to call some runtime routine to convert integer to
string, I suggest that 'image carry a second parameter, just like the
Put routines do, to control the width. So as not to disable existing programs,
default it to whatever is currently used. A Width parameter is really just the
right way, it seems to me, since then a value of 1 (or 0) says "give me exactly
the right number of characters" and a greater value suggests padding if
necessary.

Even better, give us a third parameter to control whether padding is on the 
left or on the right. Make Text_IO conform, too.

Attributes are one example of a _really neat_ thing in Ada that works 
intuitively about 90% of the time, and the 10% nonuniformity makes the
good stuff a bear to learn and causes annoyances like the above to work
around the nonuniformities.

I know, I know. I missed my shot to submit this as a revision request. I
assume someone else did, though. I'll check in my archive of RRs.

Mike Feldman