• Looking for feedback: ISO 3166-1 country Country Code Reference in Ada

    From A.J.@21:1/5 to All on Sat Apr 15 11:52:08 2023
    I just created a library for accessing ISO 3166-1 records in Ada compatible with Ada.Locales. Before I try to publish it to Alire, I'm hoping to get some feedback if anyone has some. It's possible that feedback will result in the function calls, naming
    convention, or structure being set up differently, so please let me know what you think.

    https://github.com/AJ-Ianozi/iso_3166

    I also posted this on the subreddit, so apologies for any redundancy for those viewing both!

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  • From Jeffrey R.Carter@21:1/5 to A.J. on Mon Apr 17 11:36:53 2023
    On 2023-04-15 20:52, A.J. wrote:
    I just created a library for accessing ISO 3166-1 records in Ada compatible with Ada.Locales. Before I try to publish it to Alire, I'm hoping to get some feedback if anyone has some. It's possible that feedback will result in the function calls, naming
    convention, or structure being set up differently, so please let me know what you think.

    https://github.com/AJ-Ianozi/iso_3166

    Some initial thoughts on what you have:

    It seems likely that your clients will use the alpha codes for input and display. It will be more convenient for that if the alpha codes are subtypes of String rather than distinct types.

    Since you have already enumerated all 250 possible alpha codes, your predicates could look like

    subtype Alpha_Code_2 is String (1 .. 2) with
    Dynamic_Predicate => Alpha_Code_2 in "AF" | "AL" | ...;

    and similar for the 3-letter codes.

    Since you have already enumerated all 250 possible numeric codes, you could use a restricted range for your numeric (sub)type, with a predicate restricting it to valid values.

    These use the language to do validity checking for you.

    Regarding the design of such a pkg, my initial instinct was to use enumeration types for the alpha codes, but a little investigation shows that some of the codes are Ada reserved words, so that doesn't work. So I would stick with the String subtypes and provide functions such that, given one of the values, the client can obtain the others, as well as the name. Alternatively, one could have
    functions to return a record such as you provide. Which is preferable depends on
    how such a pkg is typically used.

    There are various possible implementations, with different tradeoffs.

    --
    Jeff Carter
    "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde
    In al his lyf unto no maner wight."
    Canterbury Tales
    156

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