Re: Unbounded Strings

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

Pointers to strings are certainly possible in Ada, but that's kind of a 
sign of a C/C++ programmer trying to utilize all their C/C++ idioms in a 
different language. I remember quite a while back watching a C guy 
struggling with Ada and trying to use 'Address everywhere in passing 
parameters like strings to subroutines. He was convinced he needed to do 
that to get a "by reference" parameter because he was so conditioned to 
think that way by C. Obviously, you *can* do it that way - its just not 
necessary and really makes your life harder.

If you learn to utilize Ada's features with "Ada Idioms", you really 
don't need the pointers and dynamic allocation - at least not for normal 
string manipulation. You always *can* do it, but you don't have to do 
it. That tends to reduce the risks of dangling pointers and memory 
leaks, so you might want to try to learn "The Ada Way". :-)

MDC


Andrew Carroll wrote:
> 
> I did some experimenting, thanks to Cohen's book and persistance I found
> that I can define a pointer to a string type in Ada and allocate a new
> string when
> I want one of a different size, sort of like char* in C/C++, with the
> benefits of
> Ada bounds checking (if that still exist by default) and the memory
> management I briefly scanned over in the last comp.lang.ada email.
> 


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