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From: Stephen Leake <Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov>
Subject: Re: Please Help.
Date: 1997/09/12
Message-ID: <34197042.7CFC@gsfc.nasa.gov>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 271914335
References: <01bcbcde$f8a425c0$ca70fe8c@default> <dewar.873989183@merv>
 <5vaude$q20$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <5vbiid$luu$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -- Greenbelt, Maryland USA
Reply-To: Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-09-12T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>



Dale Stanbrough wrote:
> 
> <snip>
<
> I don't see how
> 
>         "if you want to process variable length character data, use
>          this type"
> 
> should be described as featurism. I think it took around 15 minutes
> to introduce this in the first lecture of 2nd semester. The rest
> was devoted to the text_io input model, command line arguments, and
> general new subject stuff. Not a great amount of time.
> For most students the complexity is completey hidden (only a
> handful of them even know about controlled types, and _I_ certainly
> haven't told them).

My problem with this is it leads to the assumption that we don't have to
pay any attention to garbage collection, because it magically works.
I've run into several C++ programmers whose code blindly fragments the
heap, and when I say "must run forever", they have no clue what to do. I
hope Ada programmers get better training.

Unbounded strings are very nice for beginners. However, they do require
some form of garbage collection to be used correctly. I hope that later
in the course, this will be pointed out.

Which leads me to a question about the GNAT implementation of Unbounded
Strings; do they have their own storage pool, and does Free compact the
pool? One of these days I'll try to read the source.

-- 
- Stephe