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From: Mart van de Wege <mvdwege@mail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Beginners question: Compound types, how-to?
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:05:02 +0100
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Date: 2010-11-01T14:05:02+01:00
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Brian Drummond <brian_drummond@btconnect.com> writes:

> On Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:00:52 +0100, Mart van de Wege <mvdwege@mail.com> wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I've been playing around with Ada for a bit, and like it. To teach it to
>>myself, I am rewriting some Perl code I wrote for hobby purposes, yet I
>>can't seem to get my head around how to use compound types.
>>
>>I have the following code (yes, I'm an RPG geek, sorry):
>
>>   type Ability_Type is (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha);
>
>>   type Character is 
>>      record
>
>>What am I doing wrong? I am misunderstanding something, but what? C
>>should be a record containing an Ability_Array as its first field, so I
>>should be able to index into it using an Ability_Type subscript. How do
>>I do this?
>
> Others have pointed out the syntactic problem here, and the way to
> resolve it by name qualification.
>
> I would suggest that perhaps "Player" would be a better name than
> "Character" (or perhaps "Actor" if a game player can control several
> actors).

In fact, this particular problem domain calls for inheritance, with a
generic Creature type defining the basic attributes and operations, and
Player_Character, Non_Player_Character and a Monster derived types.

Which is why I said that I am going to refactor that sooner or later anyway.

> Likewise Str ... String? Strength? Strangeness? Write them in full;
> you'll thank yourself later. If you don't like typing long words,
> either find an editor with an autocomplete function, or learn to use
> "renames".
>
Str = Strength.

As Florian said, those are domain-specific abbreviations. Anyone who
plays role-playing games will know what they mean, anyone who doesnt
doesn't have any use for my code anyway. 

In fact, I suspect once I'm done I'm the only one to have any use for
it, but hobby projects like these are always fun to learn a language
with; my previous implementation (which works), was done in Perl/Moose,
to learn that particular framework.

Mart

-- 
"We will need a longer wall when the revolution comes."
    --- AJS, quoting an uncertain source.