Re: anonymous records as tuples

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:
> And there are so many Ada 
> constructs which assume a name is handy (type conversion, generic 
> instantiation, and so on) that anonymous types tend to always have an 
> incomplete set of capabilities.

Just to play devil's advocate (for a school of thought that I don't myself subscribe to regarding the current fad of tuples & lambdas), in addition to Ada's current category of •identifier•-based naming, there does exist another kind of naming:  ••reflection-based drill-down••.  Instead of full-fledged anonymity, the de facto name of a pseudo-anonymous type in some future version of Ada could be something to the effect of:  subroutine X's return type, such as with ' syntax as reflection (e.g., 'ReturnType).  (I am not sure that this extends well to anonymous functions or anonymous procedures as lambda-expressions in Ada, because I don't see an easy way to ‘find’ a lambda-expression that lacks a name via reflection.)  It would seem that at least some of Ada's language-defined ' attributes drill down to entities that have no identifier name, e.g., 'Tag and 'Class, so there is some stunted degree of embrace of using reflection drill-down as a de facto name for entities that lack identifier-names.