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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:41:30 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2014-03-26T15:41:30-05:00
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"Shark8" <OneWingedShark@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:tvtYu.83108$tD4.27538@fx25.iad...
> On 25-Mar-14 14:41, Stoik wrote:
>> I think that even a casual user of Ada should be able to influence 
>> somehow  the new
>> version of Ada. I wonder what is high on your list of wishes for Ada 
>> 202X?
...
> (1)
> I think we should look at simplifying the standard packages.
>
> Consider also the [[wide_]wide_]string packages and the relationship to 
> [[wide_]wide_]character -- it would be very nice (as well as aiding 
> maintainability) to have the *_String [and character-handling] packages be 
> generics instantiated on the proper Character type.

I agree that this is an area that needs looking at, but I don't think using 
more generics will provide anything useable. The problem, as Dmitry likes to 
say, is that the representation and semantics of a string are intertwined, 
and those have to be separated in order to make a sensible string type 
system.

I've played with some ideas based on an abstract Root_String'Class, and 
pretty much everything necessary can be done with existing Ada 2012 
features, and the few things that can't have a fairly obvious language 
feature that could be defined to provide them (for instance, a mechanism to 
support string literals).

I think the problem is mainly going to be political rather than technical. 
The solution requires defining a large set of new packages that echo 
functionality already in the language, and that would not be used by the 
sorts of safety-critical applications that the paying customers use. 
(They're not using Text_IO or Unbounded_Strings or Directories or ...). 
That's going to make changes in this area a tough sell, I fear. Hope I'm 
wrong.

                                          Randy.