Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 3:21:04 AM UTC-5, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jun 2012 20:04:35 -0700 (PDT), Shark8 wrote:
> 
> > However, if it's a package devoted to text manipulation then we might want 
> > to use ropes rather than strings
> 
> Rope is an implementation of string that uses certain internal
> representation.

Right; perhaps I should have been more correct and said "character array"-based stings.

> 
> Similarly, encoding is an implementation of two interfaces one of which an
> array of code points another is an array of storage or stream elements.
> 
> There is no need in any libraries to be cut and paste for each of the
> infinite combination of string representations x implementation x code
> point constraints x bounds constraints etc. It is insanity.
 
Who said anything about using an infinitude of implementations? The array-based one is good for most short/simple string handling; but it's rather unsuitable for add-/delete-operation intensive tasks (on large-data) such as, say, a word-processor.

And given the very reasonable assumption that some data using a string[-and-pattern?]-manipulation package intends to do many such operations it behooves us to use an implementation conducive to the operations we will be performing.