Re: Ada202X : Adding functors

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Wednesday, November 14, 2012 1:31:53 PM UTC-8, Martin wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 14, 2012 8:37:55 PM UTC, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
> > Because arrays do not have Perform operation, they do ()-operation.
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> Yes, there was a decision at some early point in Ada's life to move away from "[]" for array accessing to "()" - which seems to be a move to deliberately make it look like a function call.

No, I think the decision was based more on a Steelman requirement that programs can be written using a very limited character set, and [] weren't in that set.  Neither were some characters we're used to using, like double quote marks.  They got around that by defining alternate syntax for string literals.  But it shouldn't surprise anyone that they solved the array problem by using () for both indexes and subprogram calls, since there was a long history of using () in other languages for array indexes and often for both array indexes and function parameter lists (BASIC and Fortran, for example).  I've seen the idea promoted before that the syntax is the same because someone wanted some kind of equivalence between array indexing and calling a function, but I think it's nonsense (especially since you can say A(I) := B for an array indexing operation but not a function, so the two aren't really equivalent).

                             -- Adam