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From: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Markus_Sch=F6pflin?= <no.spam@spam.spam>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Surprising behaviour of strings.fixed.overwrite
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 09:15:20 +0100
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Date: 2014-11-13T09:15:20+01:00
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Am 13.11.2014 um 00:19 schrieb Randy Brukardt:
> "Markus Schöpflin" <no.spam@spam.spam> wrote in message
> news:m3vdvn$uu$1@speranza.aioe.org...
>> Given the following Ada program:
> ...
>> Which is correct according to the definition of overwrite, but
>> nevertheless I find this extremely surprising.
>
> I suppose, but so what? It's not like we could change the meaning of this
> routine (or any routine in Ada.Strings), as doing so would potentially
> silently break existing code.

True, but I suspect in this case chances are that it would actually silently
fix existing code. :-)

> IMHO, the vast majority of Ada.Strings.Fixed routines are rather nonsense.
> I think they exist so that there are counterparts to the routines in
> Ada.Strings.Unbounded, but there's rarely much reason to use them rather
> than just using an appropriate slice.

That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I tend to get the indices wrong when
doing manual slicing; and I have already seen too much code getting it wrong, too.

> I personally use Ada.Strings.Fixed for Index and sometimes Translate or
> Move, and that's about it. Everything else I do with slices or loops
> (admittedly, I started doing that back in the Ada 83 days before
> Ada.Strings.Fixed existed, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to
> change). I find that I have to look up the definition (both the name, the
> parameters, and the semantics) for any other routine, and by the time I've
> done that, I could have written a slice that would generally be faster and
> smaller anyway.

I was hoping to eventually remember all these things when I would finally 
start consistently using the standardized methods provided by Ada.

But by now I think I'm better off creating my own set of functions and 
procedures which just do what I need, as it turns out that the standard 
implementation is rather slow, anyway.

Markus