Re: Ada generics

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de>]

On Sat, 2006-12-30 at 10:58 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> >> Corollary: never ever make a formal language (Ada) dependent on a natural
> >> one (German). That would make the former natural.
> > 
> > I don't see how identifier rules are natural (not formal), whatever
> > the natural language is that guides the choice of names in a
> > particular program.
> 
> Because these rules are subject of endless chaotic political changes.

I don't know about ISO or ARG political changes--besides
the rather interesting glimpses at language debates during
Ada 9X in the archives, if you want to call this politics.

But where is the chaos in the simplified Unicode rules that
have been adopted for Ada 2005 (or 2007)? You won't need
thermodynamics to find out whether or not a given word
is an identifier?

Should the characters '1' and 'l' be removed from the
Ada standard characters because that's a similar chaos?
Should there be a ruling about Finalisation versus
Finalization?


> > Take Google as an example of why finding things that were spelled
> > "incorrectly" is so immensly useful. And successful.
> 
> Do you want programming languages acting as google?

No, by referring to the usefulness of Google search I meant that

 * People value Google search service because it finds
   things, even noticing possible spelling errors,
   and it overcomes lack of structure of "the internet".
 * Programs have spelling errors, lack perfect structure.
---------------------------------------------------
 * Program analysis will provide better errors/warnings/info
   if identifier spelling, syntax, languages, etc. are given
   the attention they deserve instead of asking humans to
   always provide proper, clean, simplified input.

Perhaps compilers can profit from a notion of Almost-Homograph.
Something like soundex. When "overriding" is missing, this
circuitry could warn programmers of too similar identifiers.
Or of a possible misspelling of Finalisation.
Or was it Finalization?


 -- Georg