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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: Equality operator overloading in ADA 83
Date: 1997/04/25
Message-ID: <E974sx.D8@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 237280854
References: <01bc4e9b$ac0e7fa0$72041dc2@lightning>
 <335E0A26.16D0@elca-matrix.ch> <E93v9n.FDH@world.std.com>
 <33692089.5794807@news.airmail.net>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-04-25T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <33692089.5794807@news.airmail.net>,
Kevin Cline <clines@delete_this.airmail.net> wrote:
>Another outstanding reason why Ada never became popular for desktop
>applications.  String manipulation with the Ada standard string types is a
>major pain in the butt, and amazingly inefficient.

I'll agree that string manipulation (using Standard.String) is sometimes
a pain in the butt.  But I don't see how this contributes to the alleged
demise of Ada, since the main competitor during the mid-80's (C) is even
worse.  Nul-terminated strings are much more of a pain in the butt
(e.g. debugging the case where you forget the nul, and overwrite random
storage).  And they're less efficient in many cases.  (E.g. suppose I
want to allocate a string on the heap, and assign it the value of X
concatenated with Y.  With nul-term strings, I have to search down the
strings twice -- once to find their lengths, whereas with Ada strings,
the length is determined in constant time.)

- Bob