From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,d00514eb0749375b X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!b17g2000yqa.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Shark8 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: initialize an array (1-D) at elaboration using an expression based on the index? Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:35:35 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <3450508b-9f26-4f26-8cd1-70149ca113dc@b17g2000yqa.googlegroups.com> References: <1f6bad81-e3d2-428b-a1a0-45acc7f96f68@m7g2000yqm.googlegroups.com> <9df4e5eb-fba7-4e8c-ba44-cd1ad4081d3b@26g2000yqv.googlegroups.com> <985a178c-8dfc-48af-9871-76a64750a571@l14g2000yqb.googlegroups.com> <2penc6lgsop1583vmg9i0m429ri4ajaf9n@4ax.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 174.28.254.71 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1288553735 13545 127.0.0.1 (31 Oct 2010 19:35:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:35:35 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: b17g2000yqa.googlegroups.com; posting-host=174.28.254.71; posting-account=lJ3JNwoAAAAQfH3VV9vttJLkThaxtTfC User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0E),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:16034 Date: 2010-10-31T12:35:35-07:00 List-Id: > "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.}