Re: ASCL a doomed idea?

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Nick Roberts wrote:
> 
> I've been looking carefully at my proposal (NJR 5), Jeffrey Carter's (JC01)
> and TED's (1.3), and -- to put it totally bluntly -- I still think mine is
> the best so far (I just can't help being perfect ;-) for some fairly
> specific reasons:
> 
> (1) all my nomenclature is derived directly from Ada.Strings.* wherever
> possible, the exceptions being 'cursor', 'cursorage', 'facing', 'prepend',
> 'split', 'move_cursor', and 'restart' (about which nobody seems to have
> argued anyway), and the generic parameter Element_Type, and the function
> End_of_*, both of which I have derived from Ada.*_IO;

This is a significant problem with NJR5. Lists are not strings and use
different nomenclature.

> (3) the closed (passive?) iterator included in both JC01 and TED 1.3 is
> inferior to the open, container-wide iterator (I have already outlined,
> haven't I?) to be added to my proposal, in that it does not permit
> restarting within the client procedure, and it does not permit writing at
> all.

An iterator procedure is the only thing that is an iterator; anything
else called an iterator is misnamed. I don't know what you mean by
"writing" in this context. The iterator in JC01 allows updating the
value stored at the current position being acted upon. Insertion and
deletion should take place outside an iterator.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Hello! Smelly English K...niggets."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail