Re: String literals and wide_string literals - how?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"David Thompson" <dave.thompson2@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:s71253phu0md9cslvmq2573m2uiqmfu7lo@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:02:55 -0400, Robert A Duff
> <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote:
...
> > OK, it's not weird.  It's quite elegant, in fact, from at least one
> > point of view -- a character type is "just" an enumeration of the
> > character literals.
> >
> > But I'll bet it _seems_ weird to anyone who doesn't know Ada well.  Are
> > there any other languages that have this sort of thing?  Many folks
> > presented with the above will assume type Bit above is a subtype of
> > Character, or derived from it.  That's why I mentioned that
> > Bit'Size = 1, so the OP would understand that '0' here is not Ascii (or
> > Latin-1, or whatever) '0'.
> >
> Pascal does have CHAR as a system-provided enumerated type.
> And (normal, nonvarying) STRING as (just) array of char, although it
> doesn't have the features for all array types that make Ada string
> types (more) convenient.

But this isn't relevant; we weren't talking about only about string being
"array of character", but rather that you can define *new* character types
which then can be used in "array of new_char" to get the same behavior as
string (string literals and the like). I'm quite sure Pascal has no similar
facility to that.

My example was:
    type Roman is ('I', 'V', 'X', 'L', 'C');
    type Roman_Numeral is array (Positive range <>) of Roman;
    Eight : Roman_Numeral := "VIII";

"Roman" here is a character type, but there is no way to think of it as a
subtype of "Character" (for one thing, the literals have a different
ordering - 'C' > 'X', for instance). The fact that you can then use this new
type to get something that works like a String is what is interesting.

                             Randy.