Accessing The Command Line

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>]

with Ada.Command_Line;
with Ada.Text_IO;

procedure Echo is

    package cli renames Ada.Command_Line;
    package tio renames Ada.Text_IO;
    package int_io is new tio.Integer_IO(Num => Integer);

begin
    tio.put("my name: ");
    tio.put(cli.Command_name);
    tio.Put_Line("");
    tio.Put("nr args: ");
    int_io.Put(cli.Argument_Count, width => 1);
    tio.Put_Line("");
    for i in 1 .. cli.Argument_Count loop
        tio.put("[");
        int_io.put(i, width => 1);
        tio.put("]: ");
        tio.put(cli.argument(i));
        tio.put_line("");
    end loop;
end Echo;

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Comments:

Ada, like Python, offers the convenience of being able to specify
local “nicknames” for imported packages, to save some typing.

Having become used to the convenience of printf-style formatting in C
and other languages that have adopted it (including Lisp and Python),
I don’t miss the tedium of having to format and output one item at a
time. Though I recognize that there is no way to do printf style in a
type-safe fashion, short of going to a fully-dynamic language.

Being able to access the POSIX command line via some globally-defined
entity instead of arguments to a “mainline” procedure is something
that just about every decent language offers. C is notably absent from
this list.