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From: mcq95@earthlink.net (Marc A. Criley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: The old "Object.Method" syntax debate
Date: 21 May 2003 08:26:35 -0700
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Yeah, I'm bringing this up.  Kill the thread if your eyes just rolled
up into your head %-)

The reason I'm mentioning this is because of something I just read in
Martin Carlisle, Sward, and Humphries' paper "Weaving Ada 95 into the
.Net Environment" (http://www.adapower.net/a_sharp/asharp.pdf).

While this has been available online for awhile I only now read it in
my recent issue of Ada Letters.

What caught my attention was an almost peripheral mention of modifying
GNAT to recognize the Object.Method syntax: "Ada 95 has often been
criticized for making the syntax of dispatching method calls the same
as the imperative procedure calls. [...]  We have modified the
compiler to allow the same object.method syntax [...]  We have also
performed this modification to the Windows 3.15 version of GNAT. It
required only 127 non-blank, non-comment lines of Ada code. We expect
this syntax will make it easier for students to understand
object-oriented programming. Since we also support the standard Ada 95
syntax, we still have the nicer Ada syntax for operators (x+y instead
of x."+"(y))."

I've pretty much always thought of this as a non-issue not worth all
the bandwidth that's been expended on it, since it's a matter of
syntactic sugar.

But reading that Carlisle's team changed only 127 SLOC in GNAT 3.15 to
support it, I'm thinking that if it's that cheap to change in a
compiler (and I know there's all the regression testing and LRM
updates and so on that would have to accompany such a move), then
maybe it's worth it to allow the alternate syntax and remove one of
the admittedly vacuous objections to Ada raised by the language's
critics.

Marc A. Criley