"J-P. Rosen" wrote in message news:s5k0ai$bb5$1@dont-email.me... > Le 19/04/2021 à 15:00, Luke A. Guest a écrit : >> They're different types and should be incompatible, because, well, they >> are. What does Ada have that allows for this that other languages >> doesn't? Oh yeah! Types! > > They are not so different. For example, you may read the first line of a > file in a string, then discover that it starts with a BOM, and thus decide > it is UTF-8. > > BTW, the very first version of this AI had different types, but the ARG > felt that it would just complicate the interface for the sake of abusive > "purity". Unfortunately, that was the first instance that showed the beginning of the end for Ada. If I remember correctly (and I may not ;-), that came from some people who were wedded to the Linux model where nothing is checked (or IMHO, typed). For them, a String is simply a bucket of octets. That prevented putting an encoding of any sort of any type on file names ("it should just work on Linux, that's what people expect"). The rest follows from that. Those of us who care about strong typing were disgusted, the result essentially does not work on Windows or MacOS (which do check the content of file names - as you can see in GNAT compiling units with non-Latin-1 characters in their names), and I don't really expect any recovery from that. Randy.