Re: Leading zeros with Int_IO.Put()? Or another package?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Robin says

"Isn't it amazing!  Robert Dewar [among others] already has
had an opportunity to reply in this vein to the original
posting and subsequent ones, but it didn't occur to him to
do so, more than likely because he didn't know that a limited
facility existed in Ada."

Well nice to wake up to another entertaining post from Robin! I guess we
can't blame him too much, he clearly knows neither Ada nor the people
involved with it :-)

I do of course know quite well the Ada picture facility - I helped
design it, and in particular, probably as much as anyone I was responsible
for the decision to mirror COBOL very closely (as Robin may not know,
I am pretty familiar with COBOL, having written a big chunk of one of
the two COBOL compilers in wide spread use on PC's today -- namely the
Computer Associates Realia compiler).

What Robin is probably not aware of is that the picture facilities are
in the Information Systems annex, which means that they are not available
in all implementations, in particular, at the moment only GNAT implements
these facilities. So the solution using string operations is more portable.

As for PL/1 here, although generally I don't think it's nearly as terrible
a language as its reputation, I do think it got things wrong in the picture
area, and did not improve on COBOL. No, RObin, I don't care to elaborate, 
because I don't think enough people are interested enough in PL/1 to make
it worth the time.

Picture processing is something that COBOL got right. I see no reason
to do things much differently from COBOL in this area. 

By the way, I guess Robin should get a new printer, one with pages that
hold more than a few lines, since of course in practice the solution
with pictures is quite concise in Ada.

P.S. regarding the informatoin systems annex, it is not the case that you
can take GNAT libraries and use them with other Ada 95 compilers. The
reason has nothing to do with licenses, but rather is technical. The
library units from annex F supplied with GNAT assume very extensive
support from the compiler itself (18 digit decimal with proper decimal
fixed point semantics and handling of the intrinsic divide for example),
and at the moment only GNAT provides the necessary compiler support. I
mention this because several times now we have received questions from
people asking us if they could get annex F stuff working by (e.g.)
combining the TSP compiler and the GNAT library routines, and the answer
is unfortunately no so far!