Re: Unbounded Strings

["Andrew Carroll" <andrew@carroll-tech.net>]

I read one of the list messages a few days ago about Unbounded_Strings.
I used to post here frequently about Unbounded_String and String.
If I remember correctly the post I read was about having a "universal"
string
in Ada or something like that.  I might have agreed with them a few months
ago, but now, I think it would be overkill.

I have been working with Ada for about 8 months now.  At first I struggled
with the concept of the Ada String type and the Unbounded and Bounded
length strings.  The first month or so I thought to myself "what a whacked
out language" because of all the "apparent" hassle of converting a string
to an unbounded string or vice versa and etcetera.

Then I was writting a sort of "hello world" C++ Common gateway interface
program and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why strings in C/C++
were so easy.  char * made it all clear.

I did some experimenting, thanks to Cohen's book and persistance I found
that I can define a pointer to a string type in Ada and allocate a new
string when
I want one of a different size, sort of like char* in C/C++, with the
benefits of
Ada bounds checking (if that still exist by default) and the memory
management I briefly scanned over in the last comp.lang.ada email.

So now I am using Ada like I never thought I could before and it's just as
easy,
if not easier at times than C/C++.  Once I leaned my way around the packages
that come with GNAT a bit I found myself wanting to use Ada with the Unix
Visual Editor (VI) more and my fancy GUI IDE with C++ less.

I found myself desingning more and debugging less.  There were still
problems
of course, such as pass by value or pass by reference; I didn't know what to
use
nor did I know if I had to specify it.  I found out when I created my first
graph,
you have to specify out paramter or in and out for the parameter or you get
a
copy instead of the actual "thing".

Anyway, I'm babling about the success and pleasure I have had with Ada.
I really just wanted to put my two cents in on the string thing.  I don't
think they
need to be changed.  It's the mindset of the programmer/designer that needs
to changed.

I remember wanting to switch to Ada because of a software engineering
article
I read that said Ada cut 40% off of some portion of software projects.
Maybe
it was 60%, I don't quite remember.  Anyone know of that article?  Pretty
slim
chance with my specific description of it eh?

Well, take care Ada people.

Andrew