Re: Question on bounded / unbounded strings

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> > I don't know about you, but I seem to be surrounded by bounded strings.
> 
> Do you use Ada bounded strings?

I don't use Ada for such applications. :-)
(in a sense, bounded strings in Ada are useless for the majority of programmers...)

Yes, I have used char[N] in "other languages" on various occasions. These are bounded strings.

> > Splitting strings is inefficient for you? It is very efficient for
> > me  to split the string and pass its individual parts to separate tasks for
> > parallel processing. If you are doing the string splitting by traversing
> > the string and storing the tokens aside,
> 
> Why would you store them? In the example you gave, I would pass them 
> straight to a worker task as soon as I get one.

This is a secondary issue. You are still splitting the string.
And no, I would rather store them in a job queue. There is no way to pass them "straight to a worker task" for the simple reason that the worker task is still busy processing previous jobs.

> Not if substrings get processed,

Yes if they are not processed.

Please do not invent artificial argument extensions only to "prove" your point.
Your argument was that bounded, unbounded and splitting are *always* useless. If you have to constrain it as above, then you are already proving yourself to be wrong.

> The point 
> is that the operation of splitting as such is pointless because its 
> result has no value of its own

No, the result of splitting has a real value of its own. Get the spreadsheet and split it into individual cells - they are still real values. They might even be still useful in another spreadsheet.

> it is an intermediate which can and must 
> be dropped for the sake of simplicity and efficiency.

There is no reason to drop a data value that is needed for further processing.

> > Unbounded_String? Can be very useful as a sink for generated data in
> > whatever format.
> 
> Nope. That thing is called stream.

Nope. Stream is a high-level I/O abstraction that is not needed here. Progressive accumulation of value is called "append" and Unbounded_String has the right interface for this.

> Good, I like when people disagree.

But sometimes there is no added value.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com