From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "J-P. Rosen" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How to get this space away? Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2015 22:50:03 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: <0b23f4af-9a55-4d1d-be90-f74b316a95cf@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2015 20:48:51 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="2b3884a634d8f846e0712b4e3a92507a"; logging-data="4993"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/9oEZ+VpmaeRRVQD/qdodf" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.7.0 In-Reply-To: <0b23f4af-9a55-4d1d-be90-f74b316a95cf@googlegroups.com> Cancel-Lock: sha1:JV2Erk/ejFuo4g2KpRJQPmrThZw= Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:26166 Date: 2015-06-03T22:50:03+02:00 List-Id: 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 Adalog 2 rue du Docteur Lombard, 92441 Issy-les-Moulineaux CEDEX Tel: +33 1 45 29 21 52, Fax: +33 1 45 29 25 00 http://www.adalog.fr