Re: C vs. Ada - strings

[Keith Thompson <kst@cts.com>]

Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> writes:
[...]
> Oh, one other thing: 'Img, being a GNAT invention, *could* have
> eliminated the annoying extra blank.  Why didn't you?

TeleSoft's old TeleGen2 compiler had a set of extended attributes:
'Extended_Image, 'Extended_Value, 'Extended_Width, etc.  The
'Extended_Image attribute, for example, could be applied to any scalar
type, including floating-point (this was Ada 83, so there was no
Float'Image), and had several extra parameters with reasonable
defaults.  Integer'Extended_Image(X) would give you the image of X
with no leading spaces; Integer'Extended_Image(X, 10) would give you
the image of X padded with leading blanks to 10 characters.  They were
provided mostly to be used in the implementation of Text_IO, but they
were very useful in their own right.  I was disappointed that
something like this wasn't included in the Ada 95 standard.

There were two problems: named parameters weren't supported, and the
fact that Integer'Extended_Image and Enum'Extended_Image had different
parameter profiles cause an ambiguity when used with a generic
discrete type.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@cts.com  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center           <*>  <http://www.sdsc.edu/~kst>
Welcome to the last year of the 20th century.