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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Subject: Re: ada to c interfaces and CHARS_PTR
Date: 2000/03/15
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In article <38CF17B8.D6CCA3BF@mindspring.com>,
  Al Johnston <sofeise@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >
> > If you do this, you're missing a lot of typechecking.
>
> thanks for the example... I am really surprised at the lack of
> examples in this area.

That presumably is a comment about the text book you are using
(which I don't think you identified). I hope you are not
talking about the RM here. The RM is not intended as a text
book to learn from! It is a reference source for those who
already know Ada pretty well. About the only exception is
Annex A which is a reasonably accessible description of the
available standard libraries. Otherwise most people will not
want to learn from the RM (I am peculiar, I hate examples,
they seem useless, and I prefer to learn languages from the
standard -- I even learned COBOL from the ANSI standard, but
for most people the RM is NOT the way to learn, and most
people like to learn from example.

The reason by the way that I dislike examples is that at best
they are incomplete and do not define the rules exactly, and
at worst they are wrong (note that the examples in the RM are
not part of the normative text, so have no influence at all
on the definition of the language). But the fact remains that
most people like to learn by example, and that is why all
auxiliary material like manuals and text books should be full
of examples, including ones of the kind asked for in this post.


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