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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: ada.strings.unbounded "free" and "String_Access"
Date: 2000/03/11
Message-ID: <wccog8llcpu.fsf@world.std.com>#1/1
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Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
References: <38C5B5AD.D310C559@mindspring.com> <38c6de74@eeyore.callnetuk.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 2000-03-11T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"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