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'"

	>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.

PL/I picture editing is a lot simpler than using Ada's,
which -- if implemented by the compiler -- applies to decimal types.

For *any* data type -- binary integer, decimal integer,
float, complex, etc, PL/I has full picture editing.

It's ony necessary to use a simple line such as:

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

or, for the real mccoy,

put edit (d) (P'999.V999');	[d is decimal fixed with fraction,
				 or floating-point, PICTURE, etc]
				 

which is a lot less than the (up to) 82 lines of Ada code
suggested by various posters to force zeros to print.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Utility to print zero-filled strings of integer values.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

package zero_fill is
.....[81 lines of Ada deleted]