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From: john@assen.demon.co.uk.nospam (John McCabe)
Subject: Re: Three simple questions
Date: 2000/10/09
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Date: 2000-10-09T00:00:00+00:00
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Frank Christiny <fchris@pdq.net> wrote:


>1.  What is the correct pronunciation of Dr. Ichbiah's name?
>    Is the "ch" pronounced as in "Loch" or as in "each"?  Is the
>    final "h" is silent?

Does it matter?

>2.  What is the rationale for case-insensitivity in the language?

At least one reason is for safety against misspelling. In
case-sensitive languages e.g. in C, if I had

   int an_Int;
   :
   <various other declarations
   
   for (An_Int = 1; An_Int < 10; An_Int++)
   :
   blah blah

and compile this I will get an error because of undefined An_Int. The
risk here is that I could just go to the declarations list and add:

   int An_Int;

rather than realising that I've just written an_Int incorrectly.

>    I am beginning to think it is mostly for historical reasons
>    (some machines didn't have two case letters way back then, etc.).
>    Are there any real technical reasons for why this is so even
>    after Ada95, besides preserving backwards compatibilty?

>3.  How can one block-comment in Ada?

You can't.

>    It can become cumbersome sometimes, adding all those "--"s in
>    front of a large block of code one wants to "test out" on the fly.
>    Again, are there any good technical-engineering reasons why this
>    feature was left out?

This is another safety issue. If you want to comment out regions of
code use something like ada-mode with Emacs.


Hope this helps.


Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>