Re: += in ada

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:
> Augmented assigments need a temporary as well as ordinary assigments of
> simple expressions. So your claim about unnecessary temporaries is plain
> wrong.

If you're talking about Ada, augmented assignment operators don't
exist, so they cannot need anything. It's equally accurate to say
that every legal use of an augmented assignment operator in Ada
requires the sacrifice of a goat.

If Ada were augmented with augmented assignment operators, I imagine
their specifications would not be so deliberately obtuse as to require
what you are suggesting. Augmented assignment operators would get the
target of the assignment as an 'in out' parameter, at least in the
user-defined case. For built-in arithmetic, it hardly matters; there
it's the notational convenience that's desired, not the efficiency.