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Date: 16 Dec 92 18:42:20 GMT
From: sampson@cod.nosc.mil  (Charles H. Sampson)
Subject: No NULL Statement
Message-ID: <1992Dec16.184220.2867@nosc.mil>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <1992Dec15.203558.18211@inmet.camb.inmet.com> stt@spock.camb.inmet.c
om (Tucker Taft) writes:
>
>   In retrospect, one could argue that it would have been better
>   to have no "null" statement at all (other than simply ";") than
>   to create a situation allowing this kind [example deleted] of
>   one word error.

     The problem being discussed was a result of the overloading of
NULL in Ada.  IMO, there's too much overloading of reserved words in
Ada in an effort to minimize the number of reserved words.  (For those
who don't know, keeping the number of reserved words down was a design
requirement.)  However, denoting a null statement by the absense of a
statement is not the way to go, as Mike Feldman's example from C illus-
trates.  I worked for many years in another language that also had this
"feature".  I was amazing how many times the statement controlled by
an IF would vanish by the careless insertion of an unneeded statement
terminator.  The associated debugging problems were severe.

     Furthermore, an explicit null statement clearly says, "At this point,
do nothing."  For those of us who believe in readability, this is impor-
tant.

 				Charlie