Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message news:<ci6cc6$9br$2@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>...
> Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> : This is why I wrote about incorrectness. IF Ada's strings were designed as
> : a set of related types, then "..." literals could be ones of/convertible to
> : Unbounded_String and so an initialized ragged array would be no problem,
> : instead of horrific:
> : 
> : type Ragged is array (Integer range <>) of Unbounded_String;
> : X : constant Ragged :=
> :    (  To_Unbounded_String ("1"),
> :       To_Unbounded_String ("12"),
> :       To_Unbounded_String ("13")
> :    );
> 
> Is it really a good idea to sprinkle source code with unnamed
> string values? (No matter in what language.) If all of them are
> isolated in some module(s), where's the problem. Is it an
> aesthetical problem to have to use Ada's verbosity with strings?

It is a bit of a problem.  Just like natural language composition,
there's a fine line between too brief, too verbose, and just right. 
In the table above, the interesting parts are X and "1", "12", and
"123".  The three repetitions of To_Unbounded_String take up most of
the text while saying nothing of interest, and could be left out if
Ada supported implicit conversions at all.  Perhaps Ada's prohibition
of implicit conversions was a reaction to the problems they caused in
FORTRAN and C programming.  No doubt that FORTRAN and C got implicit
conversions mostly wrong, but that doesn't mean that they are always
bad.  It's pretty obvious what it means to convert "1" to an unbounded
string.

BTW, the code above will also use memory inefficiently since there
will be two copies of each string, one constant and one unbounded.

C++ is as bad or worse if you want to initialize a
vector<std::string>, but is better if you are OK with:
    char const * const x[] = { "1", "12", "123" };