Re: Ada Idioms Progress Preview

["Jay Nabonne" <jay@rightagain.com>]

"Robert Dewar" <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:5ee5b646.0108071819.6e84e33d@posting.google.com...
> tmoran@acm.org wrote in message
news:<SCIb7.37009$Kd7.22894159@news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com>...
> > Perhaps Ada should not have idioms.
>
> I understand Tom's point here, and I would rephrase it as a requirement
> that Ada idiom's be obvious once seen to someone who knows Ada. That's
> true for example of Stanley's Boolean'Pos idiom (which is indeed a
> useful one to know).
>
> So when you read one of these idioms, the reaction should be one of
>
> a) ah, yes, I know that, and immediately know what it means
>
> b) ah, interesting way of doing things, yes, I understand it and
> will remember this in future.
>
> It should not be:
>
> c) Gadzooks! What on earth does that mean, let me reach for the LRM.
> Ah, yes, finally figured it out -- to clever for me!
>

(This isn't really a response to Robert, but my news reader lost the top of
this thread, and this was the highest root I could attach a message to. :)

As a C/C++ programmer who is looking with interest at Ada (after a rather
entertaining discussion about Code Red in comp.lang.c++), what would be most
useful for me - and it's what I thought of when I saw the word idiom - is
something that says "in order to do <blah>, given that there's more than one
way to do it within the Ada language, here's how you write code that looks
like an Ada programmer wrote it and doesn't look like a
C++-programmer-writing-Ada wrote it.".

I'm interested in how to "think in Ada"...

Jay-