From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!goblin3!goblin.stu.neva.ru!news.tu-darmstadt.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Niklas Holsti Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Text_IO, was: Re: Something I don't understand Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:42:07 +0200 Organization: Tidorum Ltd Message-ID: References: <4a3e55f6-9f54-4084-9f37-96efd4b0d349@googlegroups.com> <0b358700-871b-4603-addd-65e07c7d59e5@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net ePhP/YVTaQwV076TQOCvcw0Ypy8mhg570xzmjZsKHpnZ1634f+ Cancel-Lock: sha1:v8y/WK3itRzU0aMNyvwnT0g1KKg= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.3.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:184944 Date: 2014-02-17T19:42:07+02:00 List-Id: On 14-02-17 19:17 , Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote: > On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 18:59:43 +0200, Niklas Holsti wrote: > >> I think that the present method of concatenating strings or using >> several Puts is good; what is needed is to extend or replace the 'Image >> attribute with similar value-to-string functions which are more >> controllable, flexible, and work also for composite types. > > Except that all these need to be MD primitive operations. There is no way > to solve this without MD. Why multiple dispatch? Which would be the multiple controlling parameters? I think only the input value should be controlling; perhaps you think that the output channel/device should also be controlling? >> Perhaps >> something analogous to the stream attributes, but with the ability to >> control the output format at each invocation, which is not possible with >> the stream attributes. > > I don't think there is any need in having formats. A few formatting > parameters could be passed along to Image or equivalent. Well, parameters and options is what I meant. For example, the ability to specify blank fill, zero fill, center/left/right alignment, digit group spacing (1 123 456,00 or 1_123_456.00), etc. > Environment settings (e.g. locale) should come from the rendering surface > object. No need to specify them at all. This is how stuff like fonts, > colors etc is handled in GUI. A "rendering surface" is not always available at the point where the string is generated. There could be a private predefined type for such settings. A value of that type could be given as a parameter in the Image call to set the default format (which could then be overridden if the Image call also has some specific format parameters). A GUI toolkit could have a function to to return a suitable value of this type from a "rendering surface" object. I don't see why this, or the output channel, should be a controlling parameter. Something like these flexible Image functions already exists in Annex F (Information Systems), but it is partly template-driven ("picture"-driven). -- Niklas Holsti Tidorum Ltd niklas holsti tidorum fi . @ .