Re: ASCL a doomed idea?

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Mark Lundquist wrote:
> 
> I have a tool in my garden shed.  It's basically a trencher, but with a
> double head -- you reverse it and it's like a three-tined hoe.  This tool is
> called a "cultivator" -- that's what the hardware store calls it, anyway (I
> used to call it a "hoedag", and still do, just to irritate my wife :-).

So you have a combination trenching tool and hoe that someone misnamed a
"cultivator". And your point is?

> Alexader Stepanov came up with this idea for how to write a suite of
> collection classes, where the collection operations were *not* primitives of
> the collections.  That way, the implementations of the collection operations
> can be reused, i.e. shared across many collection types, instead of having
> to be written custom-like for each one, and it allows the functionality of
> the collection classes to be extended without the limitations of using
> inheritance for the extension.  The collections he calls "containers" and
> the operations he calls "algorithms".  The coupling mechanism between the
> two is an abstraction he calls an "iterator".  Now, this idea is embodied in
> the Standard Template Library for a language called "C++", which many, many
> programmers in this quadrant know (or at least are able to claim to know
> enough to get hired).  As a result, most sentient beings in the galaxy are
> familiar with the concept of an "iterator" as the coupler between containers
> and algorithms.

Oh, I get it now. Since C++ got it wrong, Ada should get it wrong to be
compatible with C++. An excellent idea. Along the same lines, I suggest
removing type checking from Ada, and replacing "begin" and "end" with
{}. We'd better introduce the reserved words "class" and "friend" while
we're at it.

> And I can't say much for your choice of name for the itera... I mean, the
> uh... the dookus.  "Position" is what you call it, right?

"Position" is what it's usually called in the data structures literature
in describing the abstraction called a list.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"My brain hurts!"
Monty Python's Flying Circus