Re: Leading zeros with Int_IO.Put()? Or another package?

[rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin)]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

	>robin says

	>>"Interface to PL/I and you can use standard I/O:

	>>put edit (n) (P'-99999999');

	>>and you don't have to worry about whether the number is
	>>negative either.  The nines in the picture format
	>>force leading zeros to print.

	>>And if you want, you can insert commas in the output
	>>to make it more readable.  The picture specification becomes:

	>>P'-999,999,999'"

	>I guess robin knows PL/1 and does not know Ada!

	>If you want to use picture editing to solve this kind of problem, then
	>use the picture editing in Ada, no need to wander off into PL/1, even in
	>the unlikely case that you have a PL/1 compiler at hand. Personally I 
	>dislike the picture stuff in PL/1, they tried to improve on COBOL and
	>made a mess of it.

Isn't it amazing!  Robert Dewar [among others] already has
had an opportunity to reply in this vein to the original
posting and subsequent ones, but it didn't occur to him to
do so, more than likely because he didn't know that a limited
facility existed in Ada.  Instead, he suggested using
string facilities.

Below is Robert Dewar's previous posting:

>This is a place where CLEARLY there is a missing abstraction (Put with
>leading zeros), and it seems obvious that you fix this in the way that
>you always do abstraction extension, you create an appropriate abstraction
>and use it. If it is useful enough, hopefully it gets to be widely available.

>Note that if you do want to construct on the fly, a much clearer way is to
>use the string routines from the string packages, which have padding
>capabilities.

PL/I is not restricted to picture editing with decimal data,
(one poster suggested changing to Ada decimal data in order to use
Ada's limited editing).   PL/I requires *only* the single line:

put edit (n) (P'-99999999');

and not the (up to) page of Ada code to implement the
requirement of the original post.