Re: Simple library functions

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

scallassig@mailexpire.com (Harald Korneliussen) writes:

> I have been trying to solve some programming excercises from
> www.topcoder.com in Ada, just to compare it to Java and the other
> popular languages.
> 
> One problem I keep running into is the lack of common, useful
> utilities in the libraries that come with Gnat & Ada. One thing is
> that I had to write my own tokenizer. That gave me the opporunity to
> emulate the String.split() method in newer versions of Java, OK*. But
> now I have to do an even simpler task, converting a string of digits
> to an integer, and as far as I can see there is no function for this
> in the standard libraries!?

Look at Integer'Value in the reference manual 3.5 (52).  Example:

N : Integer := Integer'Value ("42");

> I hear there is a new revision of Ada coming. I really, really hope
> they adress the lack of a standard library of utillity packages
> instead of adding new language features.

The small size of the Ada standard library has been much debated here.
This does not mean that there are no libraries at all; I encourage you
to look at http://www.adaworld.com, http://www.adaic.com,
http://www.adapower.com, and http://libre.act-europe.fr.  These sites
list several Ada libraries which you may find useful.

> * Anyone want it? :-)

If you write some useful utilities that you are willing to share, I
think it would be a good idea to add them to one of these libraries
and join in the development.  As for your tokenizer, is it very
different from OpenToken?

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.