Re: Simplifying Unbounded_Stri

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

David Wheeler (wheeler@ida.org) wrote:

: I'm looking for some advice on how to simplify Unbounded_String
: handling. Discussion and source code follows.
..

I would recommend the following:

   with Ada.Strings.Unbounded;
   use Ada.Strings.Unbounded;
   package Unbounded_Converters is
       function "+"(From : String) return Unbounded_String renames
          To_Unbounded_String;
       function "+"(From : Unbounded_String) return String renames
          To_String;
   end Unbounded_Converters;

And then a user of unbounded strings can:
   with Ada.Strings.Unbounded; use Ada.Strings.Unbounded;
   with Unbounded_Converters; use Unbounded_Converters;

Now they have a convenient unary operator "+" for converting back
and forth between unbounded strings and strings, meaning that there
is no particular reason to create separate routines for unbounded
string output.  You might still want a version of Get_Line which
didn't bother to go through String, so you might want to add this
to your package.

I don't see the need to define a child package, and as you mention,
implementations are allowed to limit the creation of child packages
of implementation-provided packages (though I doubt that many will
impose such limitations).

-Tucker Taft  stt@inmet.com
Intermetrics, Inc.