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From: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: conversion
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 20:04:13 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: GMUGHDU
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Date: 2003-07-06T20:04:13+00:00
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Alexander Kopilovitch <aek@vib.usr.pu.ru> wrote:
: Georg Bauhaus wrote:
: 
:> > The varying strings of unspecified maximum size are common for many applications
:> > outside of current, quite restricted Ada world. And arrays of such strings
:> > are no less common.
:>
:>Care to list some examples?
: 
:  /* C/C++ example */
: 
:  char *Titles[] = {
:                    "Quizionary",
:                    "Nose To Nose",
:                    "Myself",
:                    "General Dissent",
:                    "Veteran's Opinion",
:                    "Corporate Science Weekly",
:                    "Truth, Wealth, Health",
:                    "Bribery Times"
:                   };

If you need to have syntactic sugar, you can have

   Titles: constant array(1..8) of String_Access :=
     (-"Quizionary",
      -"Nose To Nose",
      -"Myself",
      -"General Dissent",
      -"Veteran's Opinion",
      -"Corporate Science Weekly",
      -"Truth, Wealth, Health",
      -"Bribery Times");

where
   function "-"(s: String) return String_Access;

I am always trying something like the following. The string literals end
up as literals in the assembly listing, so there does not seem to
be allocation at run time, despite new:

procedure str is

   type String_Access is access constant String;

   Titles: constant array(1..8) of String_Access :=
     (new String'("Quizionary"),
      new String'("Nose To Nose"),
      new String'("Myself"),
      new String'("General Dissent"),
      new String'("Veteran's Opinion"),
      new String'("Corporate Science Weekly"),
      new String'("Truth, Wealth, Health"),
      new String'("Bribery Times"));

begin
   null;
end str;

But, as a sidenote, I alway try to avoid string literals in source
code. They make the text fixed, a typo requires recompilation,
language translation requires that programmers be involved, because
the translators do not know how to recompile the program to include
the latest translations, etc. If that seems too much, there could be
an enumeration of the 8 strings above, such that, for every natural
language (or other variation in the string values), you could have

    array(Languages, Kinds_of_Titles) of String_Access := ...;

in some library package.

What is more, the varying size you have mentioned is known at
compile time in your example. But for sure string literals are not
the usual input to a string processing program?

-- Georg