Re: status of Ada STL?

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Russ wrote:
> The length of the symbol is one measure of complexity, but what
> bothers me even more than its length is that ":=" is just plain ugly.

Only because you aren't used to looking at it yet (and *are* used to 
looking at "="). To me, and probably most other Ada programmers, "=" in 
assignments looks ugly (which is one of the reasons why you are getting 
such an unexpected negative reaction).


> I'm a pretty good programmer in C++ and Python, and I'm trying to
> learn Ada too. I constantly forget to put in the colon and have to go
> back and put it in. It's a minor nuisance, yes, but a totally

And I have the same problem with C++, until I get my mind fully switched 
over. So what?


> himself, "Let's see, am I using Ada now, or am I using a language with
> standard syntax?"

{guffaw}

There is no such thing as "standard syntax" for programming languages. 
Fortran doesn't use either "=" or "==" for equality. Cobol, which is by 
far the most widely used language in existence, doesn't use symbols at 
all. Algol, Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, Eiffel, VHDL, Oberon, and 
Oberon-2 all use very similar notations to Ada. APL I believe uses an 
arrow for assignment, while J (an ASCII version of APL) uses "=:" and 
"=.". Lisp uses "set" for assignment and uses "=" only for numeric 
comparisons.

When learning a new programming language, you have to learn the syntax. 
Insisting its syntax is bad simply because it doesn't match one or two 
other languages you are used to using is the height of parrochialism.