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Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:53:36 -0400
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: += in ada
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Date: 2003-10-15T14:53:36-04:00
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Vinzent 'Gadget' Hoefler wrote:
> You heard about "abstraction"? Ada is a high level *language*, not a
> high level assembler.

But the concept of "add this to that" *is* an abstraction.

 > And BTW, it's a funny thing that the compiler might compile
 > |a += 2;
 > to
 > |   movl a,%eax
 > |   addl $2,%eax
 > |   movl %eax,a
 > instead of
 > |   addl $2,a

See? It's an abstraction, not an attempt to duplicate assembler!

> The idea was to let the programmer say what it wants and let the
> compiler figure out how to map that onto the target hardware

Exactly. And what the programmer wants is to add a value to
a variable. If I'm keeping a running total, I want to say
"add this item to the total" not "compute the sum of the
current total and this item, and replace the current total
with the new total". That's why COBOL had "ADD A TO B."