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From: "Brian Catlin" <briancatlin@mindspring.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: C-style 'union' in Ada?
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 23:06:13 -0700
Organization: Sannas Consulting
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:11830
Date: 2001-08-13T06:06:15+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

I'm still trying to get both lobes around the Ada paradigm.  I have a record that I want to hold a pointer to a buffer which is
either a String or Wide_String, but I don't want to statically declare which, so using a variant record won't work (at least given
my understanding).  Likewise, I don't want to have two record definitions, one for String, and one for Wide_String.  In the package
I'm designing, I don't care whether it is a String or Wide_String, I will just pass it to the file I/O packages (stream, in this
case).  In C, I would:

struct
    {
    ULONG    length;

    union
        {
        STRING_DESC                *ansi_string;
        WIDE_STRING_DESC    *wide_string;
        } strings;
    } string_desc;

and then:

struct
    {
    ...
    string_desc    file_name;
    ...
    } some_struct;

What is the idiom or method to use in Ada?

 -Brian