Re: Porting ADA source

[Wes Groleau <groleau+news@freeshell.org>]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> What is the advantage of forbidding "string" ?

None that I know of.  But the powers that be when
the project started decreed that all predefined types
are non-portable, therefore all types must be subtyped
or derived from types created AND rep-spec'd for the
project.  Much of Standard and System was re-implemented
to support these types.  Character was the only predefined
type exempt (why was that different?), so arrays of Character
with "portable" index types were used instead of String.

Assigning string literals to these arrays was either
humorous or nerve-wracking, depending on how much
time pressure you were under.

Interestingly, string literals and character literals
were one of the Ada 95 conversion headaches.  :-)

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://groleau.freeshell.org/