Re: Real Time IO routines -- answering Simon Wright part 1

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:24:20 +0100, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

>   So using 'Image or not seems a use case issue to me.
> Seen from this point of view, the language, or some
> notion of purity, cannot decide what the use case is.

Right, this is why an equivalent of 'Image is often preferable to Text_IO.
Because it does not add so much unnecessary stuff and its does not limit
you to where and how the image will be placed. Usually for text rendering
you would better have normal string images of values which are then
aligned, wrapped, colored, shaped etc in some way. It is a bad idea to try
to pack all this in one call like Put. The fact that the built-in 'Image is
not very usable, for many reasons already mentioned by others, changes here
little. I just use my own equivalents instead. For example, I prefer UTF-8
subscript for the number base (rather than ugly 16#...#) and superscript
for its exponent part, when I do GTK+ GUI.

So "use case" is indeed an important point. The original poster said
nothing about the use case, so I used Image just in order to illustrate my
point. Which was that Unchecked_Conversion of Time to Duration is an ugly
non-portable hack, which is absolutely unnecessary, because Ada.Real_Time
already provides Spilt for the purpose of getting seconds since the epoch.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de