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From: john@nospam.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: The old "Object.Method" syntax debate
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 07:58:07 +0000 (UTC)
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On 21 May 2003 08:26:35 -0700, mcq95@earthlink.net (Marc A. Criley)
wrote:

>Yeah, I'm bringing this up.  Kill the thread if your eyes just rolled
>up into your head %-)

<..snip..>

>I've pretty much always thought of this as a non-issue not worth all
>the bandwidth that's been expended on it, since it's a matter of
>syntactic sugar.

In most cases it *is* just a syntactic sugar issue, but it's a very
big issue when trying to explain to C++ and Java (and Visual Basic)
users how you would do something equivalent in Ada to what they've
already learned. The fact that Ada "method" calls look absolutely
nothing like what you would expect an object-oriented language's
method calls to look like is, in my view, a big issue in relation to
Ada's acceptance by less broad-minded developers.

As David points out, it *is* very nice to be able to see a pop-up
window of what options are available for an object as soon as you type
the ".".

>But reading that Carlisle's team changed only 127 SLOC in GNAT 3.15 to
>support it, I'm thinking that if it's that cheap to change in a
>compiler (and I know there's all the regression testing and LRM
>updates and so on that would have to accompany such a move), then
>maybe it's worth it to allow the alternate syntax and remove one of
>the admittedly vacuous objections to Ada raised by the language's
>critics.

Agreed.


Best Regards
John McCabe

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