Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)

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

On 27 Sep 2004 07:31:44 -0700, Kevin Cline wrote:

> Matthew Heaney <matthewjheaney@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<uekkpt07s.fsf@earthlink.net>...
>> kevin.cline@gmail.com (Kevin Cline) writes:
>> 
>>> One of the most frustrating things I found in Ada programming was the
>>> inability to make user-defined types work like the built-in types. 
>>> Given
>>> 
>>>   A: array (1..10) of integer;
>>> 
>>> then the expression A(5) is a modifiable reference to the fifth
>>> element of A.
>>> 
>>> After experience with C++ it was amazingly frustrating to learn that
>>> there was no way I could define My_Container so that I could write:
>>> 
>>>   C: My_Container ;
>>> 
>>>   C(5) := 7;
>> 
>> Indeed, you cannot do this.  In AI-302 (and in Ada.Strings.*), you have to say:
>> 
>>    Replace_Element (C, Index => 5, By => 7);
> 
> I think this was a major error in the language design.

It was not an error, in the sense that no irreparable damage was done. It
seems that the issue was just put aside for better times. Ada has a rich
infrastructure supporting array types and their index types. So to reshape
Ada's arrays out of abstract "array interfaces" one need to take all that
presently hard-wired infrastructure with. Note that C++ does not solve the
problem, because it has no arrays. So it allows you to define [] and leaves
you alone with that. It is not the Ada's way (TM).

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