Re: Newbie-ish question about generics and Ada.Streams

[Brian Drummond <brian_drummond@btconnect.com>]

On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 13:59:27 -0500, Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
wrote:

>Brian Drummond <brian_drummond@btconnect.com> writes:
>
>> Comments welcome, but the specific points I am unhappy with are:
>> ...[3 things]
>
>It's reasonable to be unhappy about these things.
>There are no better workarounds than the ones
>you have already discovered.

Thanks.

>But why don't you use Shape'Image, possibly with
>a call to To_Lower?

Because that would restrict the output to file, which I wanted to control. 
(It could be an actual toy block, if the target was Lego Mindstorms!)

It would certainly work for this example though - ditto the string pointers.
This was only intended as a simple example to illustrate the issue.

The real case involves binary data, not text; and under some 
circumstances I must perform manipulations such as endian swaps. (Otherwise I
could simply use the appropriate representation for the enumeration, and allow
the default Integer'Write to take care of it.)

Thanks,

- Brian