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From: mheaney@ni.net (Matthew Heaney)
Subject: Re: renaming Interfaces.Java.Ada_To_Java_String to the + operator
Date: 1998/01/25
Message-ID: <mheaney-ya023680002501980844030001@news.ni.net>#1/1
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References: <dewar.884996680@merv> <199801191436.PAA25860@basement.replay.com>
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Organization: Estormza Software
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-01-25T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <199801191436.PAA25860@basement.replay.com>, nobody@REPLAY.COM
(Anonymous) wrote:

>I've been developing software professionally since 1975, and using Ada
>since 1984, and I only recently encountered this "old idiom" by reading
>about it here. Perhaps it is familiar only to those involved in the
>language design and implementation. I know I never encountered it in 14
>years of reading the ARM, Ada texts, and Ada-related articles.

This technique was discussed in John Barnes' book, Programming In Ada.  He
used it to construct a ragged array of strings.  Actually, that turns out
to be a popular use of the identity operator, to populate an array:

declare
   Aardvark : aliased constant String := "aardvark";
   ...
   Elephant : aliased constant String := "elephant";
   ...
   Zebra : aliased constant String := "zebra";

   type String_Access_Constant is access constant String;

   type String_Array is
      array (Positive range <>) of String_Access_Constant;

   Animals : constant String_Array :=
     (Aardvark'Access,
      ...
      Elephant'Access,
      ...
      Zebra'Access);
begin

This is more or less the example in John's book.  (His Ada 83 example put
the strings on the heap, using the identity operator to hide to allocator
invokation.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Heaney
Software Development Consultant
<mailto:matthew_heaney@acm.org>
(818) 985-1271