Re: Ada2005

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <o8NR7.13079$7y.147028@rwcrnsc54>, Mark Lundquist says...
>
>"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
>news:nxKR7.58838$xS6.95364@www.newsranger.com...
>> Why would anyone want to? Isn't it rather stupid to allocate space in
>several
>> objects to a field that will always be the same? I understand why C++ does
>this:
>> they don't have packages to put their constants into. So if one wants to
>> associate a constant with a class, there is no choice but to do it this
>way and
>> waste the space.
>
>No... you can do this
>
>in Foo.h:
>
>    class Foo {
>        static int i;
>        .
>        .
>
>in Foo.C (typically):
>
>    int Foo::i = something;

Perhaps that might be marginally better for *some* purposes than doing the same
thing with a deferred constant in Ada. If you like the fact that the value is
hidden away in the body, you can get the exact same effect with an inlined
function if you really want to.

>I think what the OP means is something like a const data member in C++.  If
>so, he should learn about discriminants.

Ahhh. I thought the issue was class-wide constants. Either way though, you can
do this just fine in Ada today.

>> Perhaps there should be a revision in there to include a version of
>> Get_Line implemented as a function.
>
>...such as GNAT's Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Text_IO.Get_Line.  I think it would
>be great if that were added to the standard in a language revision.

Yes; basicly that, but returning "String" instead of
"Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Unbounded_String". Just toss it into Ada.Text_IO and be
done with the whole issue.


---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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