Re: initialize an array (1-D) at elaboration using an expression based on the index?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

> "Necessary" is not a valid criterion for anything more human-oriented than a
> Turing machine. Remember that Ada views programming, above all, as a human
> activity.

Hm, I disagree there. 'Necessary' is an extraordinarily valid
criterion for precise-languages, and even precision within languages.
One could argue that the lower-case letters are not necessary, and as
far as the possession of an alphabet goes they are not; English,
however, places some constraints on when to capitalize something --
the following two sentences are exactly the same except for a single
instance of capitalization:
I helped my uncle Jack off a horse.
I helped my uncle jack off a horse.

These two sentences have differing meanings because of English and,
therefore, we can see that insofar as English is concerned Upper-case
and Lower-case letters are not unnecessary.

This relates, because we were discussing the design of languages
(specifically Ada). If we were to throw in every idea that people had
w/o regard to 'necessary' we would quickly have a mess of a language
the result of which would make C++ look like Ada, comparatively. (That
is to say, all hope of consistency would be lost.)

In my opinion, I think that something like Delphi's properties on
objects would be useful; though they are strictly-speaking not
necessary (though they certainly could simplify 'interface' objects by
unifying 'getters' and 'setters'). That is something presented to the
outside world as a field of an object which may be readable and or
writable and may 'rename' a private-field or method of that object.
{You could then then have a 'field' that validates incoming data when
it is set; like disallowing someone from setting their computer's
Calendar to 31 Feb.}