Re: Parameterised 'Image Attributes

["J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Le 19/08/2023 à 12:03, Dmitry A. Kazakov a écrit :
> On 2023-08-19 11:14, J-P. Rosen wrote:
> 
>> The intent of the 'Image attribute is to have a quick representation, 
>> mainly for debugging purposes.
> 
> It seems that for the vast majority of Ada users this intent was wrong...
The vast majority of Ada users ignore a number of useful features 
provided by the language, and keep asking for improvements that are 
already there...
>> If you want nice formatted output, use the Put procedure on String 
>> from Text_IO.
> 
> Put does not supersede 'Image. Put is I/O. 'Image is pure string 
> formatting. Put is generic and requires instantiation of some package 
> with some difficult to guess name. 'Image is built-in [statically] 
> dispatching and generated automatically by the compiler.
> 
Yes, put has nothing to do with 'Image. Yes, put requires instantiation. 
So what? Ada is more verbose, in favor of stricter typing. Ease of 
reading over ease of writing has always been a major design principle of 
Ada - although I confess it had a bad effect on its popularity, people 
want to write fast and ignore long term maintenance issues.

If you want formatting on an integer type (with or without IO), you 
instantiate Integer_IO. I don't find it hard to guess the name... Maybe 
you had something else in mind?

-- 
J-P. Rosen
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