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From: jdege@jdege.visi.com (Jeffrey C. Dege)
Subject: Re: Software landmines (loops)
Date: 1998/09/18
Message-ID: <slrn703hlo.362.jdege@jdege.visi.com>#1/1
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References: <slrn6sopmg.4fg.jdege@jdege.visi.com> <35f51e53.48044143@
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 <35EEF597.A1119EF4@draper.com> <m3ogsw503u.fsf@mheaney.ni.net>
 <35F5B529.6DC6A59A@draper.com> <m3pvcv6cr5.fsf@mheaney.ni.net>
 <EACHUS.98Sep17221142@spectre.mitre.org>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-09-18T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 18 Sep 1998 02:11:42 GMT, Robert I. Eachus <eachus@spectre.mitre.org> wrote:
>In article <m3pvcv6cr5.fsf@mheaney.ni.net> Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org> writes:
>
>  > I have a string that was padded on the right with blanks.  What I need
>  > to do is strip off the blanks, and return the index of the last
>  > non-blank character.
>
>    Not to disagree with Matt, because he is trying to give an example
>of how to reason about a problem, but there is a better approach:
>
>    Ada.Strings.Fixed.Trim(S,Right)'Last
>   if Temp = S'First then return 0; else return Temp; end if;
> end Last_Non_Blank_Index;
>
>    Why bring this up?  Because when doing ANY kind of engineering,
>the first approach to try should be to ask, "Is there something in the
>standard catalog that is available off-the-shelf?"  It is so easy and
>enjoyable to solve these problems in Ada, that we often lose sight of
>how much grief using the library function will save later.  

And if you don't have a a catalog, off-the-shelf tool to solve the
problem, create a tool and put it on the shelf...

-- 
Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to
be the HP-48 series of calculators.  They'll run almost anything.  And if they
can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the
HP-48 VT-100 emulator.