[OT] Mailinglist for Ada programming? (was Re: [gtkada] configura tion files)

[Stephen Leake]

Preben Randhol <randhol at pvv.org> writes:

> Stephen Leake <stephen_leake at acm.org> wrote on 28/05/2002 (11:45) :
> > It might be good to support aggregates for normal Ada records. We
> > could use a variant of Auto_Text_IO
> > (http://users.erols.com/leakstan/Stephe/Ada/auto_text_io.html) to
> > generate the code to read/write records to ini files. But maybe that's
> > overkill. 
> 
> If one need ASIS I think it is overkill yes, but perhaps hmmm

Well, you only need ASIS at compile time. At runtime, you just have
aggregate parsers. And Auto_Text_IO does _not_ support arbitary
aggregate element order, so the parsers are really simple.

Everybody should use ASIS at compile time. It's good for the soul :).

> I was thinking
> 
> would it be of additional value (to robustsness) if we made:
> 
> Version.Float=0.1
> Max_Value.Integer=10
> 
> I mean that the last word before = is a description on what type is on
> the other side of the = ?

Shades of XML and Hungarian notation. To keep things simple, I think
the type should be implied by the Ada function called to read the key.

Hmm. I guess if we want to be able to process arbitrary keys
dynamically, you have a point. But I don't want to go this far; the
Ada code has to know what type it is looking for, just not the actual
name or value.

-- 
-- Stephe