Re: Ada generics

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Wed, 03 Jan 2007 15:55:54 +0100, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 11:10 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> On Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:45:27 +0100, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
>> 
>>> On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 14:51 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I find "вода" far more descriptive! (:-))
>>> 
>>> I wouldn't hesitate to write "вода" in a Russian only program.
>> 
>> Ah, but then you are in a big trouble, because "вода", "воде", "водой",
>> "воды", "водами", "водах" would all be equivalent in terms of what they
>> describe, i.e. "water", "lack of content", "confusion making", "being
>> ignorant", "alcohol drink", "time passed", "equivalence", "being down"?
>> Should Ada compilers learn Russian inflection rules?
> 
> Declination etc. can be overcome by object oriented spelling.
> Always use the nominative, and have ":=" etc. indicate the other
> cases. :-)

Nope, inflections is true and only OO! (:-)) You have an Indo-European root
(=object) "вод" (or maybe "wodr"̥) and add a method using a suffix -а, -е
etc! Positional systems like in English are old fashioned functional! (:-))

>>>> Natural language words (even pictographs)
>>>> describe absolutely nothing but themselves. 
>>> 
>>> (How can you be certain of this? :-)
>> 
>> As a proof consider a human being who does not know written Russian.
> 
> So to a Russian, a Russian language word describes something. Right?

It does something to anybody. Maybe, you could train a cat to recognize
some of written words. That does not make them descriptive. 

>> And run into mess. Can you tell me what is what without resorting to a
>> binary editor in the following:
>> 
>> К, K, Κ, Қ
> 
> Same as 1 and l, O and 0, nothing new here.

No, it is not. There exist fonts where 1, l, I, | have recognizably
distinctive glyphs. Differently to this, Cyrillic and Latin *share* letters
and so glyphs of A, B, C, E, H, I, K, M, O, P, T, X. With this, ANY
reserved word of Ada could be spelt in a way that at least one letter would
be Cyrillic. That would make it a legal identifier, as Randy has confirmed.
I consider this as a disaster. Not because I enjoy reserved words (a half
of them are unnecessary anyway), but because it demolishes the foundations
of the language design.

> BTW, I don't need a binary editor for distinguishing similar shapes.
> An editor that informs about its characters is enough. (This character
> thing on the screen should be an object, anyway.)

But that is obviously wrong! According to the Ada standard, Latin C and
Cyrillic C are two different identifiers. Glyphs tell lies!

>> Huh, none of these words is an *identifier*! They just don't use
>> descriptive identifiers, neither for free variables, nor for functions.
> 
> I was referring the the "uncompiled math source code" and its use
> of full words in math declarations, definitions, proofs and so on.

Such issues are to be covered by comments. In a comment you are free to
place any stuff, except for playing with format effectors.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de