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From: rav@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (robin)
Subject: Re: Leading zeros with Int_IO.Put()? Or another package?
Date: 1996/11/13
Message-ID: <56bi13$3pa$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 196133531
expires: 10 February 1997 00:00:00 GMT
references: <baldwinE0Eq2n.KLB@netcom.com>
 <327FB8A3.745B@itg-sepg.logicon.com> <55ubsh$lh0$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
 <dewar.847457421@merv>
organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1
nntp-posting-user: rav
Date: 1996-11-13T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


	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]