Re: Clear Screen

["Norman H. Cohen" <ncohen@watson.ibm.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> The features in annex J are fully supported in Ada 95, and are tested
> by the ACVC suite, and must be fully supported in all Ada 95 compilers.
> They may be used freely in Ada 95 programs -- some people may feel for
> aesthetic reasons that they want to avoid the use of annex J features,
> but that's a bed they make for themselves.

"Deprecated features" are listed in the most recent COBOL, Fortran, and
Ada standards.  I think Robert is correct in identifying deprecation as
an aesthetic issue.  It's basically a form of disclaimer by the
designers of a language revision, saying, "This construct violates MY
aesthetics.  If I were starting from scratch, I would never of dreamt of
including this feature, but since I have to maintain upward
compatibility, we're stuck with it.  But look at how beautiful the
language would be if I could remove these legacy features!"

Often, the fact that a language feature is deprecated means that there
is now a better way available to accomplish the same result.  However,
if a programmer feels a compelling need to use the old feature in a
particular situation, he ought to feel free to do so.

(Concerning the ASCII package, I would take the trouble in new programs
to write

   with Ada.Characters.Latin_1; use Ada.Characters;

This allows me to write Latin_1.Esc rather than ASCII.Esc, and, more
important, it allows me to write things such as
Latin_1.Registered_Trade_Mark_Sign.)

-- 
Norman H. Cohen
mailto:ncohen@watson.ibm.com
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/n/ncohen