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From: Hyman Rosen <hymie@prolifics.com>
Subject: Re: Ragged Array Proposal
Date: 1999/09/23
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-09-23T23:31:54+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@callnetuk.com> writes:
> Try telling a C++ programmer that, in Ada, they have to declare an access
> type, and then repeat the "new String'("xyz")" incantation for every string,
> just to declare an array of strings, and they might be likely to say "Ada?
> No thanks, I'll stick to C++, if you don't mind."

A C programmer, maybe. In C++, if you want to initialize one of the
STL containers with constant data, you pretty much have to make copies
of things.

In C, we often do

char *fruits[] = { "apple", "orange", "pear" };

The compiler does a bunch of accounting for us to make this possible.
What we have really written above is the following:

static char unique_apple[6]    { 'a', 'p', 'p', 'l', 'e', 0 };
static char unique_orange[7] = { 'o', 'r', 'a', 'n', 'g', 'e', 0 };
static char unique_pear[5]   =  { 'p', 'e', 'a', 'r', 0 };

char *fruits[3] = { &unique_apple[0], &unique_orange[0], &unique_pear[0] };

Is it possible to do something similar in Ada?
Something like (forgive my fractured pseudo-Ada syntax) -

apple:  aliased String(5) := "apple";
orange: aliased String(6) := "orange";
pear:   aliased String(4) := "pear";

type StringPtr is access String(<>);

fruits: StringPtr[1..3] := (apple'access, orange'access, pear'access);