Accessing Addresses in a Passed String

[Pat Van Canada <google@spellingbeewinnars.org>]

Hi Everyone.

Happy New Year!

I am stuck with a problem. I have an application were I must use pointers, despite the fact that I try to avoid them.

in the declarative section, I can write:

       str2 : aliased string( 1 .. 4 ) ;

and then I could potentially access the address of each character in the string.

However, I cannot use "aliased" in an argument list and worse yet, since it is effectively a character array, it will be passed by pointer.

Here is a little snippet of what I am trying to do:

       procedure  double_draw (  row : in integer ;
                              column : in integer ;
                                word : in out string ) is

       begin

       for j in  column .. word'length loop
       input_pad(row,j).ch_ptr             := word(j)'access ;


This is not going to work, does anyone have a suggestion of how I might work around this? My only solution right now is to move this to the calling code and simply pass the address of each character of a string

Thanks for reading-Pat