Re: Ada has no continual line(s) ??

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"hongxun lee" <lee.1801@osu.edu> wrote in message news:<ad6b5t$69t$1@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>...
> this (is exactly my worry) works well..
> 
> > x :string := "One ring to blahdy blah, "
> >      & "One ring to blahdy blahdy blah, "
> >      & "One ring to blahdy blah and bla ";


Actually this is a weakness in Ada. It is not always the
case that you can replace a long string literal with several string
literals concatenated together (it is
interesting to leave this up to the reader to figure
out when it fails :-)

There really should have been a lexical convention for
continuing long strings. An obvious one would simply be
to say that you can break a long literal into two, e.g. replace "long
string" by "long " whitespace "string".

In practice the exceptional cases are rare, but still
it is annoying to have nasty little exceptions like this.