Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[quiet_lad <gavcomedy@gmail.com>]

On Jun 10, 8:49 am, Shark8 <onewingedsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, June 9, 2012 4:25:05 AM UTC-5, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>
> > Ada is (by design) a safe language.  But the side effect is that
> > strings are arrays of characters and the developer is forced to be
> > mindful of boundaries.. bogged down with detail.
>
> And yet, if we were not mindful of [array] bounds, we would be screaming at all the times using strings caused a buffer-overflow.
>
> There are ways to "work around" the problem, like the reading long/variable-length strings piece-at-a-time and constructing the result inside a function. (Using recursion:http://www.adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=Basics&CID=202)
>
> That said, there are languages that are made for text processing, SNOBOL [IIRC] is one such language. (Also, I think there's an Ada port of the SPITBOL macros as part of the GNAT-specific packages.) Ironically, most of them aren't used in the mainstream of software development which tends to fall back on C's string manipulation [style of] functions or Regex (which is horrible if you look at Regex from a maintenance perspective.).

How handle the strings without regex?