Re: confusion with string initialization

Colin Paul Gloster wrote:
> Why did you consider a book which makes which packages things are in
> unclear by mutiliating programs by means of the USE keyword to be
> excellent?

John Barnes spends a lot of time throughout the book explaining how the 
with/use clauses work, how library units work, how the 
scope/visibility/accesibility systems works and how packages work. He 
does not blindly "abuse" the use keyword. Quote:

"However, there is a strong school of thought that use clauses are bad 
for you since they obscure the origin of entities. In order to alleviate 
this dilemma there is also another form of use clause, the so-called use 
type clause. This can be placed in a declarative part just a like 
package clause and has similar scope. It makes just the primitive 
operators of a type directly visible."

As a beginner I've had much joy out of reading the John Barnes book. It 
deals with a complicated subject matter in clear and concise manner. At 
least that's my experience, and I came from a more or less pure 
scripting (PHP/Bash/XSLT) background, so many of the Ada concepts were 
very or completely alien to me.

I think the examples in the book are very clear, if you bother to 
actually READ the book, and not treat it like an Ada cookbook. So from 
this beginner the book gets two thumbs up.  :o)

With that said, I would personally like a book on Ada with a more 
cookbook like approach, especially if it had a chapter on project files 
and compiling in general.

-- 
Regards,
Thomas L�cke

Email: tl at ada-dk.org
Web: http:ada-dk.org
IRC nick: ThomasLocke