From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.glorb.com!peer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post02.iad.highwinds-media.com!fx18.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Shark8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/32.0a1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Help with type definition References: <8beec1c1-9ca2-44fc-9d7e-0cd0aa772dcc@googlegroups.com> <1fg1g0pncjb4l$.1qve7hld7nxqv.dlg@40tude.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: X-Complaints-To: abuse@teranews.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 16 May 2014 16:30:22 UTC Organization: TeraNews.com Date: Fri, 16 May 2014 10:30:31 -0600 X-Received-Bytes: 1211 X-Received-Body-CRC: 2030534020 Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:19865 Date: 2014-05-16T10:30:31-06:00 List-Id: On 16-May-14 09:50, Simon Wright wrote: > But it's the_length_ of the string; so what meaning would OP attach to > a received message with a length of zero, vs a length -1? While it's true that the empty-string and null are different, when it comes to transmitting the data it makes little sense to transmit what is non-existent -- though I suppose you could.