Re: Desirability of C++

[Gautier <gautier.demontmollin@maths.unine.ch>]

tmoran@bix.com wrote:

> >made the right decision on strings when they selected counted strings for
> >Turbo Pascal/Delphi even if they are limited to 255 characters or less.
>   How do those differ from
>     ... is new Ada.Strings.Bounded.Generic_Bounded_Length(255);

The whole package is for the TP "String[255]" type only. If you have
sorts of "String[80]" here, "String[20]" there, and so on, it means an
instance of the whole package Ada.Strings.Bounded.Generic_Bounded_Length
for each maximum length, with whole code for all operators, with conversion
issues, renaming of the different Bounded_String etc.! If you simply define...

package BorStrings is

  type BorString( maxlength: positive ) is private;
...
private
  type BorString( maxlength: positive ) is record
    length: Natural:= 0;
    s: String( 1..maxlength );
  end record;
  -- NB: length allows longer strings than the "s[0]" in T/B-Pascal

end BorStrings;

you can have all of TP strings at once, with one type, one package!
In addition, translation from TP/Delphi is much easier

"var s: string[255]"      -> "s: borstring(255)"
"type t_ident=string[100] -> "subtype t_ident is borstring(100)"

and so on :-). IMHO the day of creation of Ada.Strings.Bounded was
a bad one...

_____________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://members.xoom.com/gdemont/