Re: GNAT 3.14 NEW FEATURES LIST Current as of May 30th, 2001

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Al Christians wrote:
> 
> > NF-314-7910-004 Uniform behavior for Slice subprograms
> >
> > In packages Ada.Strings.Bounded/Ada.Strings.Unbounded, the Slice
> > function now returns with the bounds of the slice expressions,
> > rather than with a lower bound of 1.This was discussed in the ISO
> > WG9 ARG, and it was agreed that this was the preferable approach. This > change also improves the efficiency of these two functions.
> 
> Will that break much code written otherwise?

Hopefully this will make the results of Slice have the same bounds with
all compilers. As a test/example program, the PragmAda Reusable
Components provides strm_sub.adb, which has to go to some effort to work
properly regardless of the bounds returned by Slice. There is an AI to
provide this behavior, but at the moment I don't remember its number or
status.

Well written code should not make assumptions about the bounds, and so
will not be affected by this. Code that relies on GNAT returning a lower
bound of 1 will break with this version, and with at least one other
compiler.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I wave my private parts at your aunties."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail