Re: ada vs. cpp

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <dFlw7.173483$w7.26404906@news02.optonline.net>, Mike Mohr says...
>
>Since we are discussing orthogonal language features
>which constitute string defects if not present, how
>do I explicitly pass Ada strings by value or reference?

Since its fairly easy for the compiler to figure out which will be more
efficient at compile time (which is what Ada does), the only reason you would
need for doing this would be if you want to do it *less* efficiently. Odly,
noone has really found that need that I have heard of. :-)

Well, there is one other use: in interfacing to external routines. That's where
Ada's interface support comes in.

I'm curious how you think you do this in C++ though. An array of chars is
essentially a pointer, and thus will always get passed by reference no matter
what you do. "string" is an opaque type defined in the STL almost certianly
using pointers, and is thus in the same boat. So how do you force value?

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T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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