Re: How to get this space away?

["J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Le 03/06/2015 21:07, Laurent a écrit :
> On Wednesday, June 3, 2015 at 12:28:34 AM UTC+2, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> 
>> >'Image always adds a leading space
>> > for a non-negative value. Nobody seems to like it, but the ARG won't change it.
> Does the ARG give a reason for not wanting to change it? Does that mean that in the
> case of a negative value you have to add it yourself? Doesn't really make sense.
> 
This dates back to Ada83. The initial idea was that a positive number
and its opposite (negative) number should have the same number of
characters. Forcing a '+' to all positive number would not have been
pretty, so the design team chose to put a space for positive numbers
(negative numbers just have an initial '-').

At first, it looked like a good idea, especially since 'Image was not
intended to be used extensively, but just for debugging purposes. For
IOs, people are supposed to use Text_IO, which provides all the desired
formatting. In practice, it turned out to be a bad idea, and lots of
programs have some functions to remove the initial space - and now,
changing that would break all these programs. And the ARG is very picky
about upward compatibility.

The only possibility would be to define a new attribute. Small effort,
small value.

-- 
J-P. Rosen
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