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From: "Alex R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Vector of Vectors.
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Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:10:07 +0100
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Date: 2009-01-15T11:10:07+01:00
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Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:

> Peter C. Chapin wrote:
>> 
>> Surely there must be a straight forward way to do this!
> 
> I'd probably use Update_Element.

Which one could argue is straightforward from a conceptual point of view, 
but requires a lot of typing.

I think there was an old discussion about why it was not a good idea to have 
functions returning accesses to the elements for this[*], which would enable 
what Peter was attempting (since without something like C++ references 
there's no way to do this with similar code). I have done so for my use 
sometimes, but is ugly nonetheless. Exposing accesses to client code is not 
nice, to put it mildly.

[*] Dangling pointers IIRC was the reason. In GNAT case I suspect that 
dangling cursors is not any better since they don't do reference counting 
anyway.