Re: ada.strings.unbounded "free" and "String_Access"

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>]

"Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@callnetuk.com> writes:

> Really, the type String_Access, and the function Free, are provided purely
> as a convenience. They could easily have been omitted (to be declared
> incidentally instead), but that was obviously felt to be just a little too
> inconvenient by the designers of Ada 95 (and I agree with them).

Right.  The inconvenience comes from the fact that you will end up with
several String_Access types in different packages (some probably called
String_Ptr, and so forth), and then when writing some code that uses
more than one package, you end up with a bunch of silly type
conversions.

If you always use the One True String_Access, you avoid that problem,
although that seems kind of kludgy if you don't really want to use
Unbounded_Strings.

- Bob