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From: tmoran@acm.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: conversion
References: <3EFC45BE.5030904@attbi.com>
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:39846
Date: 2003-06-27T18:42:26+00:00
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>Hmmm.  Where to begin.  You are thinking in C about Ada concepts.  That
>is confusing you because the Ada mappings are different.  In Ada, the
  As a general rule, if something seems inordinately hard to do in Ada,
you are probably not using Ada appropriately.  In the case of strings,
declaring dynamically sized strings, passing strings as dynamically sized
parameters, using concatenation, and, especially, using slices will handle
a great many string processing tasks.  eg,

  procedure Process_Line(Line : in String) is
  -- From "Fred Smith #12345; John Jones, Albert"
  -- make 2 calls on Process_First_Name
  --   Process_Full_Name("Smith, Fred");
  --   Process_Full_Name("Jones, John");
    First, Last : Natural;
  begin
    First := Line'first;
    loop
      Ada.Strings.Fixed.Find_Token
           (Source=>Line(First .. Line'last),
            Set   =>Ada.Strings.Maps.Constants.Letter_Set,
            Test  =>Ada.Strings.Inside,
            First =>First,
            Last  =>Last);
      exit when Last = 0;
      declare
        use Ada.Strings;
        use Ada.Strings.Maps.Constants;
        First_Name : String renames Line(First .. Last);
      begin
        Fixed.Find_Token(Line(Last+1 .. Line'last), Letter_Set, Inside,
                         First, Last);
        exit when Last = 0;
        Process_Full_Name(Line(First .. Last) & ", " & First_Name);
      end;
      First := Last+1;
    end loop;
  end Process_Line;
  ...
  Line : String(1 .. 80);
  Last : Natural;
  ...
  Ada.Text_IO.Get_Line(Input, Line, Last);
  Process_Line(Line(Line'first .. Last));