Re: Build language with weak typing, then add scaffolding later to strengthen it?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 3:31:33 AM UTC-6, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:
> 
> Isn't that in itself an argument for letting Ada 2020 be a major change,
> where backwards compatibility isn't as important as using our current
> knowledge to improve the language?  I wouldn't want an Ada 2012 program
> to be accepted by an Ada 2020 compiler with a different meaning, but I
> wouldn't mind it if the Ada 2020 compiler told me that I have to do
> things differently in Ada 2020.


If we accept a breaking change, then we could clean up the [[Wide_]Wide_]Character and [[Wide_]Wide_]Strings.  -- Randy had an interesting idea about that a while back (I forget the details though).

If we went with a sort of "abstract type" idea we could we could simplify the Character/String-packages in the standard library. It might also give us a chance to look at allowing User-defined attributes... though that might be a bad idea (I like being able to look any particular attribute up in the standard

Another thing that would be nice is a way to initialize containers in-source w/o functions -- but overloading the aggregates more than they already are to handle that might be far too much effort for the comparatively little gain. Also, a way to refer to indices when in an array-aggrigare would be nice; Ex: I:Array(1..4,1..4) of Integer := (others => (if I'Index(1) = I'Index(2) then 1 else 0));