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From: Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Q: type ... is new String
Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 00:37:22 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: 2012-05-31T00:37:22-07:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 30 Maj, 18:33, tmo...@acm.org wrote:
> Any comments on the effectiveness of using multiple types for different
> categories of strings, rather than "String" all the time?

Interestingly, this is a bit different from defining multiple number
types instead of using standard types all the time.
The difference is that number types carry bounds as additional
information and that can be comfortably used to later define arrays,
loop ranges, etc.
Strings don't have this capability (unless, of course, you define
constrained String (A .. B) types) and the only added value of
defining separate types is in (potentially) increased readability and
(potential) compile-time assistance in avoiding mixing apples with
oranges. I write "potentially" in braces, as the balance between costs
and gains is not always obvious here - in particular, a gain in
readability can be devastated by later need to instantiate tons of
generics or spraying type casts all over the shop just to get simple
things done (example: try to print a log message containing several of
such values).

It is a typical engineering tradeoff between being rock-solid and
lightweight.

As to performance (if that was your original question), you *can*
expect some performance degradation due to these tons of instantiated
generics increasing the executable working set and competing for cache
space. How much? I have no idea. :-) And it has to be judged in the
context of the target system.

--
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com