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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Array Of Constant Strings?
Date: 22 Feb 2003 14:31:36 -0500
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Date: 2003-02-22T14:31:36-05:00
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Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org> writes:

> Name_List : constant array (1 .. 26) of Name_String :=
>     (+"Anthony",
>      +"Barbara",
>      +"Claudia",
>      ... and so on.
> 
> I don't like this, though. One of Ada's explicit design goals is to
> emphasize ease of reading over ease of writing, and "To_Bounded_String"
> is clearer than "+" to the reader. This is the opposite of C's
> philosophy, in which ease of writing is everything and ease of reading
> is unimportant.

I don't agree.  I think putting To_Bounded_String all over the place
makes the code *less* readable.  Bounded_String is, conceptually, a
string type (even though the RM doesn't say so), so string literals
ought to be allowed for it.

Using varying-length strings should be just as painless as using
Standard.String; literals, array indexing, etc, should be allowed
without cluttering the code with explicit conversion operations that
don't really do anything interesting.

> If all the strings are always the same length, then using fixed length
> strings is even simpler. However, I would tend to be suspicious of such
> a requirement; things like that are almost always changed later.

Well, we don't know why the OP wants same-length strings, but I agree --
such a restriction seems suspicious.

- Bob