Re: Unbounded Strings

[Steve O'Neill <oneils@gbr.msd.ray.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> 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.

My favorite abuse of 'address though still has to be code I reviewed
where
the developer had many routines where he was passing addresses of
locally
declared variables out of procedures.  This was code for a device driver
and, of course, the reasoning was that "this would be faster".

The good news was that this was caught during a review and never made it 
to the point of attempting to be run... although it would have been 
interesting to see the results.

Steve O'Neill