Maybe not exactly a variant record.

["Josh Highley" <joshhighley@hotmail.com>]

Josh Highley <joshhighley@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:371c84fb.0@silver.truman.edu...
> I have the following type declaration and I would like to have an array of
> them.  However, I need "length" to have different values for each element
of
> the array.
>
> type field (length : positive) is limited private;
> --it's later defined to be a record with a string(1..length), among other
> information.
>
> For instance, I would like field_array(1) to be a field with a length of
10,
> field_array(2) to be a field of length 50, and so on.  Can I declare an
> array of these fields, with each field of a different length?
>
> I'm using GNAT 3.11, AdaGIDE 6.21, and Win95

I guess I should clarify.  I'm not exactly sure the record is variant, at
least not in the sense as some people have thought.  So, here's the private
declaration of "type field(length : positive);"

private
    type field (length : positive ) is record
         row            : y_pos := 0;
         column       : x_pos := 0;
         fld_length   : positive := length;
         text            : string(1..length) := (others => ' ');
         text_length  : natural := 0;
         label           : string(1..x_pos'last) := (others => ' ');
         label_length : natural := 0;
         align           : alignment := left;
         char           : character := ' ';
         position      : natural := 0;
    end record;

I know there's a lot of room for optimization, but it gets the job done : )

So, the value of "length" doesn't change the record fields that are
accessible, just the number of characters in a string.  Now that I've better
described the situation, does this change the responses to declaring an
array of type field with different lengths??

P.S.  For my future reference, is the record that I've declared above
considered a variant record, or is it called something else since the
available record fields don't actually change with the value of "length"?

Thanks again,

Josh Highley
joshhighley@hotmail.com