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Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 11:09:10 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: In-Out Parameters for functions
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Date: 2004-01-30T11:09:10-05:00
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Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> will be caught by the SPARK toolset...
 > establish guidelines...

To be caught by a toolset requires whole-program analysis.
At the very least, this dooms people who are writing libraries
or generics. Establishing guidelines is no substitute for having
the language avoid problems. C has a guideline that you should
not index beyond the end of an array.

> To change the rules now would make lots of code obsolete.

How can defining something which was previously unspecified
make code obsolete? I'm not saying that Ada should change
any specified behavior it currently has, I'm just saying
that currently unspecified behavior should become specified.

> Now think about the effort required to develop the tools
 > for your proposed change, and go away.

There's certainly work involved in the compiler to make it
evaluate things in a specific order. I personally would not
classify it at the "go away" level. I know that GCC includes
a Java compiler, so it at least has infrastructure for doing
this at some level.