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From: Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Invade wikipedia!
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:37:17 -0800 (PST)
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Date: 2009-02-26T08:37:17-08:00
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On Feb 26, 6:13 am, Jean-Pierre Rosen <ro...@adalog.fr> wrote:
> Ivan Levashew a =E9crit :
> [...]>    Integer_Text_IO.Put (8, Width =3D> 0);
> > [...]
> > But, once again, it looks stupid.
>
> The output is the same, and it looks less stupid if you write:
>     Integer_Text_IO.Put (8, Width =3D> 1);
>
> > Integer'Image (-2) =3D "-2" -- no space here no matter how useful it is
>
> The whole idea of text_io was to make well aligned columns, which is
> sensible for files (as opposed to user messages on the terminal). The
> damn space was simply felt more elegant than a '+' in front of positive
> numbers.

Yeah, but since 'Image doesn't yield a fixed-length string, the
aligned column argument doesn't make a lot of sense.  I can see how it
makes sense for Text_IO, but not for 'Image.

Although people can try to come up with legitimate-sounding reasons
why 'Image was defined the way it was, I think this is just one of
those features that causes language designers to look back and say
"what the #$*&(#@ were we thinking?!?!?"  Unfortunately, they can't go
back and change it now.  And we now have Ada.Fixed_Strings.Trim to
make things a little more tolerable, and other library packages to do
things the way they should have been done in the first place.

                                  -- Adam