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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Bounded_Strings
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 23:55:56 -0500
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Date: 2008-04-04T23:55:56-05:00
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"Adam Beneschan" <adam@irvine.com> wrote in message
news:444c0bf9-a2ad-4280-8d69-58d59938f69e@d2g2000pra.googlegroups.com...
...
> Again, this doesn't sound reasonable in the context of the sort of
> "business applications" that I used to work on in COBOL.  For other
> types of applications, it's probably OK, or Ada.Strings.Unbounded may
> be best.  The reason I'm even thinking about all this is that I had
> been hoping for a number of years now that Ada would be able to make
> inroads into "business" applications and maybe be seen as an
> alternative to COBOL, and I'm a bit disappointed that, AFAIK, nothing
> or very little has happened in that arena.  Not that I think
> Ada.Strings.Bounded is a major reason for this, or that providing a
> better string-handling facility would help at all.  (shrug)

I think that the inability to write a package that "naturally" uses literals
(and possibly indexing and slicing) for a private type are also large
impediments. (Worse, the current string packages cannot be retrofitted to
use such a capability even if it was added to Ada, lessening the possibility
of doing that.)

Net-net, I think the string packages are a disaster: just good enough to
prevent them from being properly replaced, but not good enough to use in a
natural way. (And Ada doesn't do anything useful to support UTF-8, which
doesn't help matters any.)

                          Randy.