Re: String to Integer conversion?

["David C. Hoos, Sr." <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com>]

Matthew Heaney wrote in message ...
>Agreed, but here's another argument.  My _expectation_ was that there
>would be a predefined instantiation for type Duration, because other
>types in Standard had predefined instantations.  If it's natural for me
>to expect something to be there, then maybe it should be there.  Maybe.
Just to put my two cents' worth in on this subject, let me relate an
experience of several years back on a large Ada83 project.

I was looking at ways to speed up compilation, reduce executable size, etc.,
and one of the discoveries I made was that there were dozens of
instantiations of Duration_IO throughout the system.  The impact of these
many instantiations is, to be sure, dependent in large degree on how the
implementation does generics.  But in this case, there was NOT ONE instance
which was necessary -- i.e., all of what was being done could have (should
have, in my opinion), and now is being done with the attributes 'image and
'value.  In other words, no one was reading or writing to or from files with
these instances, so the code for all of the file operations was wasted.

I, for one, was glad to see 'image and 'value provided for floating point
types, since many of the uses of instances of Float_IO were similarly used
for things which could be more simply done with the attributes.

David C. Hoos, Sr.