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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Access to strings and string subtypes?
Date: 2000/03/17
Message-ID: <wcczorx1tkq.fsf@world.std.com>#1/1
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Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
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Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 2000-03-17T00:00:00+00:00
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Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> No one has answered the original question of WHY this annoying
> limitation is in Ada95. It is a (misguided in my opinion)
> worry about efficiency. It allows implementations to omit
> templates on objects with explicit bounds to save a little
> bit of space.

I don't think it was purely an efficiency issue.  I think we were
concerned that existing Ada 83 implementations were already doing that
optimization, and would have difficulty changing the way they represent
arrays.  So we might have decided differently if we were designing a new
language from scratch -- I'm not sure.

I agree that the restriction is somewhat annoying.

I also don't like rules that make arrays and discriminated types
gratuitously different -- in my opinion, bounds and discriminants are
(or at least *should* be) essentially the same thing.

- Bob