Re: Can I have an array of variant records?

[bglbv@my-dejanews.com]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com> writes:

> <<incorrect information snipped, in which he answers this
> question with a no, instead of a yes>>

Thank you for the correction. (As a perhaps feeble defense, I'll
point out that my answer was "not that I can see", which is a
rather tentative form of "no".)

> To expand on my previous short message. Just declare the
> type with a default discriminant. In this case you can
> freely alter the discriminant value later on, and such
> types compose freely (although some old compilers, notably
> the Alsys Ada 83 compiler had rather severe size
> limitations on the composition of such types).
> 
> Of course typical compilers will allocate the maximum space
> for each element, so if this is not acceptable, you will
> indeed need to use pointers.

Aha. So it isn't enough _in practice_ to give the discriminant a
default value: one also needs to pick its subtype carefully.
How big is Positive'Last on a typical implementation, I wonder?
(>= 32767, I know.) Still, this looks cleaner than my Bounded_String
suggestion.