Re: Image attribute (yet again)

[Stephen Davies <joviangm@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, 26 April 2020 07:05:59 UTC+1, J-P. Rosen  wrote:

> Personnaly, I am sick of people wanting to change the language just to
> save having to write a three-line function.

I could write a three-line function to do 'Min but I appreciate it
being party of the language.

> 'Image is not intending for elaborate formatting

Displaying numbers without extraneous spaces is hardly elaborate.

> it's a quick debugging help.

I have used 'Image in delivered code and I doubt I'm alone. Furthermore,
it's useful when first learning Ada, and the leading space is not a
good advert for students.

> Text_IO has all formatting features for proper IO.

Text_IO is somewhat lacking when it comes to formatting
(e.g. see Jere's and Oliver's replies).

A couple of additional thoughts:-

1. If Trim_Image were added then Trim_Width should also be added,
   which could be useful even when Integer_IO.Put is being used.

2. If the language won't change (and maybe even if it does change)
   perhaps if would be nice if Gnat added S'Trmg (c.f. S'Img).