Re: miniscences

["Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com>]

I do a lot of training of Ada programmers (no more jokes about the blind
leading the blind, please :-}.  I shall have to add this one to the list
(it gets longer and longer :-|  You say this is an old idiom: how old? 
[Uncle Nicky nearly goes back to when the only things programmed were
programmed with pins in boards]  I remember the days when it wowed us when
we could put MID$ on the left.  And when Crystal (remember them?) had got
their BASIC into a 6K ROM.  [Here we go...]  I remember the days [pillow
hits head] who threw that?  Oooh yes, I was once the proud owner of the
original Sinclair computer (can't even remember what it was called now). 
You know, the one with 1K of RAM, of which three-quarters was needed for
displaying a screenful of info?  Ah, those were the days.  None your unary
operators then.  Those days it was lone operators.  Ever tried getting a
real BASIC program into 300-400 bytes?  Ah yes, you had to be a _man_ to
program those days.  Ah, yes [another pillow] who threw that?  [Etc...]

-- 

Nick Roberts
Croydon, UK

Proprietor, ThoughtWing Software; Independent Software Development
Consultant
* Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com * Voicemail & Fax +44 181-405 1124 *
*** Eats three shredded spams every morning for breakfast ***


Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in article
<dewar.884996680@merv>...
> Indeed the use of the "+" notation assumes that programmers are familiar
> with this idiom. It is an old one which was well understood at the time
of
> the original design, and I would have thought it was pretty universally
> known. Certainly it is something that all Ada programmers should be
familiar
> with. Even if you don't like to use it yourself, you are highly likely to
> run into code that does use this convention.
> 
> I certainly agree that the use of idioms like this is often quite
dependent
> on familiarity. 
> 
> Of course in this particular case, it seems to me that a programmer
> who was unfamiliar with this notation would quickly find out what was
> going on. You encounter the operator +, and in the normal manner, seek
> out its definition (using whatever special tools ytou have to help with
> this). Then the spec of this "+" will of course have comments explaining
> the use.
> 
> Anyway, it is clear that one benefit of this thread is that at least the
> current readers of CLA are now familiar with this very standard idiom,
> whether or not they choose to use it themselves :-)