Re: Printing Enum Variable Re: Linux World

[fraser@synopsys.com.com]

I nearly cried when dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org said:

>I never meant this as an attack on Ada. It just that complaining about C
>for lack of enumeration strings is as appropriate as complaining about
>Ada for lack of a "?:" operator. It's not that big a deal. 

Believe me, I'd have to kill myself if I got narky whenever someone
said that a feature in Ada is not necessarily positive.  But you're
still wrong :)

I see the enumeration string thing itself as being minor.  However,
consider what being able to provide that feature means: enumerations
are actual, real live types just as, say, integers are.  Having an Image
attribute is a big flag that says an enumeration is something more than
just a convenience; it says that the language supports it, nutures it,
and holds it when it cries.

I think that your comment about a similar operation in C being inconsistent
with the semantics of an enum in that language is telling: it shows that
they're not really there.  They're just window dressing.

Attributes indicate a lot about the type system.  For an array object X,
being able to write X'Range, X'First, X'Last etc. tells you that Ada
has a lot of support for what arrays actually are.  The fact that these
things are not available in C (not even X'First in the general case [1])
tells you how C feels about the construct.  It doesn't have arrays, it
has chunks of memory that you can allocate in a single declaration.
Big whoop.

This is, of course, completely informal.  But a programming language is
more than just a reference manual, it's a style as well.

Oh, and sorry for the purpleness of the above.

Fraser.

[1] there's a C idiom that goes char a[100]; char *b = a-1; which gives
you an array b from 1 to 100.  Sure, it violates the standard, but name
a compiler that rejects and I'll give you twelve zorkmids.