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Date: 21 Jun 93 22:14:37 GMT
From: haven.umd.edu!news.umbc.edu!nobody@purdue.edu  (Mike Berman)
Subject: Re: Ada Operators in 9x
Message-ID: <205bsdINNbca@umbc4.umbc.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes:

| In article <C8yCIC.4C0@dale.cts.com> helkenn@dale.cts.com (David Helken)
| writes:

>>Can anyone from the 9x team (or anyone else for that matter) explain the
>>exclusion of user defined operator names in Adaxx?

| Sign.  A sad story.  Algol-68, you may recall, had this feature.  The

| But Algol-68 had the necessary "enabling technology": a way to distinguish
| lexically between user-defined operators and user-defined identifiers.  In
| other words, distinct upper and lower case letters.  Ada has only one 
| letter case, which is why we have those silly reserved words, and why
| it would make the compiler's life very complicated to allow arbitrary
| user-defined operators.
| 
| And the reason Ada has only one letter case?  Upward compatibility with
| junk hardware already obsolete when the requirement was written.  Yuk.

Whoa. Back up. Are you saying that case sensitivity is a good thing?
Am I missing liberally-placed smileys somewhere?

If I am interpreting this post correctly, the point is that Ada is
designed to be case-insensitive so as to support machines, such as
110-baud teletypes with oval keys, that have no mixed-case capability.
Since it's possible, however unlikely, that one may only be able to type
FRED, then Fred, fred, and frEd should all denote the same identifier.

If so, then fine, but the maintainability aspects "accidentally" derived
from this upwards compatibility decision can't be denied. While machines
excel at tracking minute details, I prefer not having to keep track of
both identifier spelling and permutations of case when reading someone
else's code.

Capabilities like the use of arbitrary identifiers as operators are
nice, but I, for one, would not revert to case sensitivity to get them.

Also, the potential for "obfuscated Ada" contests would be rather
scary...

-- 
Mike Berman
University of Maryland, Baltimore County     Fastrak Training, Inc.
berman@umbc.edu                              (301)924-0050
       The views represented in the above post are my own.