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From: Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: New Software Forum
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 13:38:21 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Norwegian university of science and technology
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On 18 Sep 2002 09:04:39 -0400, Stephen Leake wrote:
> It has _never_ been a feature of Ada that the type of an object was
> obvious at the point of the use of the object. Consider:
> 
> A := B + C;
> 
> Is A an Integer, Cartestian Vector, or directed graph? You have no
> idea. However, any reasonable Ada IDE will provide a way to popup the
> definition of A, so you can see the type.
> 
> In fact, the fact that there is no type information cluttering the
> statement is a feature. Compare it to the use of "Hungarian notation"
> in some Windows code.

Hmm yes you are right. The problem though is that if this is presented
to a beginner he will wonder why he cannot Put_Line his Float or some
other custome type in the same way without realising that you need a new
Text_IO package.

> My only problem with Ingo's suggestion is that it is a pain to provide
> the "appropriate string package", that defines all of the necessary
> variations of "&". That's why I wrote Auto_Text_IO
> (http://users.erols.com/leakstan/Stephe/Ada/auto_text_io.html); it
> writes a similar package for me.

I find myself always using 'Image as I don't bother with the hazzel of
remembering to with Float_IO, Integer_IO etc... so 'Image is faster. :-)

Preben