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From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How to get this space away?
Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2015 11:37:41 +0200
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Date: 2015-06-04T11:37:41+02:00
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On 03.06.15 22:50, J-P. Rosen wrote:
> 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
>
> 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.

Since 'Image and 'Width go together, would there be a choice?

> In practice, it turned out to be a bad idea,  (...)
> The only possibility would be to define a new attribute. Small effort,
> small value.

Ada could stop supporting 'Image entirely, and instead create

   Annex F.4, Edited Output for Integer Types

If 'Image was intended for debugging purposes, It is quite obvious
that 'Image keeps being misused. But:

  I/O is what we are payed for.
  I/O is the raison d'être of programming.

So, please, stop helping programmers evade proper I/O.
So many languages have made everyone suffer from poorly
defined I/O facilities, in effect making everyone use I/O
facilities developed "for teaching", or, in case of Ada,
for debugging.