Re: Other Ada Standards (was Re: SIGada Conference)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I'd bet that new reserved words are right out. Breaks upward 
compatibility of old code and all that. Although if one is looking for a 
variant on "with and use" that would be a good choice.

If it were possible to go adding new reserved words, how about:

library Ada ;

Giving the equivalent of a "with" for everything in the tree Ada... But 
then someone would want:

use library Ada ;

and want it to imply a with of everything under Ada as well as a use, 
and we're back to that whole thing... Now I've just thrown a turd in the 
punchbowl, havn't I? ;-)

I think its all a tempest in a teapot. While there might be some small 
convenience in some version of a "with and use", I don't see this as 
something that is either fundamentally broken, adding some new major and 
important capability or otherwise making the language significantly more 
attractive to the non-Ada crowd. The time spent implementing and 
verifying it could be better spent by adding new sublibraries to Ada 
that gave the user more leverage. Which would people rather have:

with and use My_Homegrown_Library_For_Tough_To_Get_Right_Math_Ops ;

or

with Ada.New_Math_Ops_Extensions_For_2005 ;
use Ada.New_Math_Ops_Extensions_For_2005 ;

Personally, I'd rather have to type two lines of code (over and over 
again, if necessary) than to develop my own matrix math, stats package, 
operations research math, etc.

Providing a bunch of pre-packaged math libraries with Ada would have the 
advantage of a) being relatively easy to specify and test, b) fairly 
straightforward to implement without hurting the compiler, and c) likely 
to make the language more attractive to people who have to do 
complicated math. Providing a "with and use" or "use implies with" is 
likely to a) be tricky to get right without breaking something, b) 
require fundamental changes to the compiler and c) not likely to make 
that many people thrilled to be using Ada. I'd say "no brainer" but 
that's just me. :-)

MDC


Chad R. Meiners wrote:
> 
> How about
> 
> see Ada.Text_IO; -- ;-)
> 
> Procedure Hello_World is
> begin
>    Put_Line("Hello World.");
> end Hello_World;
> 
> 


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