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

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

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

>Richard says that he concedes that it is too bad that the picture
>editing does not work for integers, but only for decimal. I can't
>see that as significant, it is trivial to extend the abstraction
>to cover the integer case if this is useful.

Did I say it was significant?  Did I say it was non-trivial?
Surely the point of my con version to Decimal_Integer was to *show*
that it is a trivial extension, and anyone even halfway familiar with
Ada would see how that idea could be used to build an appropriate
abstraction.

Let me state clearly:
    I do not see
	Put(Decimal_Integer(<<E>>), To_Picture("<<P>>"));
    as _significantly_ harder than
	PUT EDIT(<<E>>) (P'<<P>>');
    or whatever the PL/I code was.

    I regard the "magic string" in the first and the "magic picture" in
    the second as equally poor, and would prefer to use named pictures
    in either language.

    I am willing to concede that you then end up with an explicit conversion
    in the Ada version that is not needed in the PL/I version, but I note
    that roughly the same number of *tokens* is needed in the two languages,
    so even then a "PL/I is simpler" claim is harder to sustain.

-- 
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.