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From: murphy@mips.COM (Mike Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: C Strings in Ada?
Message-ID: <39330@mips.mips.COM>
Date: 12 Jun 90 18:11:07 GMT
References: <920024@hpclapd.HP.COM> <920026@hpclapd.HP.COM>
Sender: news@mips.COM
Reply-To: murphy@mips.COM (Mike Murphy)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <920026@hpclapd.HP.COM> defaria@hpclapd.HP.COM (Andy DeFaria) writes:
>Also, no one has  address  my other  concern about  how to represent  these
>strings in structures such as:
>
>struct data_record {
>   char *path;
>   int  path_length;
>   char *name;
>   int  name_length;
>}

It seems to me that the simple solution is to just define a c_string
type which is an access to a constrained string, and then some routines
to convert strings to c_strings and vice-versa.  Then you define your
records to match the C structures:
	type data_record is record
		path 		: c_string;
		path_length 	: integer;
		name 		: c_string;
		name_length 	: integer;
	end record;
The cost of converting strings to c_strings is probably not as bad as you 
imagine, depending on your application (e.g. chances are you will only
convert string to c_string once, then do many calls to C routines with
the c_string structures).

BTW, Verdix uses such an approach in their UNIX interfaces (there is a
c_strings package in the standard library).

-- Mike Murphy
-- UUCP: sun!decwrl!mips!murphy or murphy@mips.com