[GAP] advice on Ada in general programming languages course

[Robert Dewar]

Alejandro R. Mosteo wrote:

> Let's see, I don't see nothing fundamentally wrong in Unbounded, but 
> when you start adding the "no use" rule, throw in some I/O needs 
> (another package(s) to with/instantiate), all that after being as 
> teacher in the uneasy situation of saying "yes, String is a string but 
> to do that is easier to use this package...", you're already in a 
> somewhat defensive position.

WHy on *earth* would you "throw in" the no use rule. This is a silly
rule in the context of student teaching, and it is by no means agreed
on in other contexts (i find it frankly terribly misguided these days,
when tools can perfectly well at a click tell you where anything came
from). Unbounded is definitely designed to be used with a use clause.
To do anything else is unnecessary and unjustified torture of students,
and yes, by gosh, such an approach jolly well should put you in a
defensive position.

> This is a thing that has always been in my mind about standard packages. 
> There are some that provide everything you can need, but lack just the 
> extra "ergonomy" factor. An example: if you want to trim some string, 
> you need to with two packages and call a function in one with arguments 
> in the other (Ada.Strings and Ada.Strings.Fixed IIRC). It may be that I 
> lose time over too tiny details, kind of a neurosis, but I find these 
> things disturbing.

And you will find it much more disturbing of course if you don't use USE.
The proper style is to do WITH/USE of the packages you need, jsut something
you can cut and paste from anywhere, and then use the stuff without caring
what package it is in.

I am sympathetic to providing a renaming (I recommend unary "+") for
To_Unbounded_String.