Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I understand when its appropriate and why it may hve been included. I'm 
wondering if in *practice* people actually make much use of it. To 
create it from String is near trivial (just a record with a string and a 
discriminant - Been there. Done that. Got the Ada83 T-Shirt.) and most 
of the places where I would have put it to use, the type String works 
pretty much as well. You can look for the last non-blank character and 
treat that as the end of the string, so its semi-flexible and of a fixed 
maximum length.

I'm not really complaining that it exists - at least not that much. It 
just seems that it is of marginal usefulness and now means that any 
extensions to Ada involving strings has to support three variants 
instead of two if you want to keep things orthogonal. (Creating a 
Text_IO variant for String, Bounded_String and Unbounded_String along 
with whatever else seems to need such variants.)

Like I said, I've never personally used it for anything (and yes, I do 
embedded work as well as other things) and I'm wondering if others have 
actually used it in practice or do people just hop over to 
Unbounded_String the instant the type String seems to be the wrong answer.

MDC


Mark A. Biggar wrote:
> 
> Bounded string is suppose to be for those cases where you need strings
> that vary in length but also don't want to or can't support heap
> allocation of string buffers (embedded, etc.).  It's a small but
> necessary nitch.
> 


-- 
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

     "All reformers, however strict their social conscience,
      live in houses just as big as they can pay for."

          --Logan Pearsall Smith
======================================================================