Re: Ada202X : Adding functors

[Martin <martin@thedowies.com>]

On Wednesday, November 14, 2012 9:45:26 PM UTC, Simon Wright wrote:
> There may be some point in this in C++, if the templating mechanism only
> cares about the syntactic feature of ()-represents-invocation. I'm not
> sure I want to know.

This bit isn't quite right...the point about C++ templates (with their Duck typing) is that they _don't_ want to know that it's a function call...in fact, it might be a function call or a functor. And using functors give the C++ compiler chances to optimise that aren't available otherwise.

NB: Functors can also hold state unlike the functions that can't (other than static state - and then you have other problems).

Ada already has this 'don't know from looking' feature wrt to arrays (which look like function calls) and enumerates (pretending to be functions).

-- Martin