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Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:59:18 +0100
From: Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Subject: Re: Beginners question: Compound types, how-to?
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Date: 2010-11-03T13:59:18+01:00
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On 03.11.10 02:59, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:
> Le Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:46:37 +0100, Georg Bauhaus
> <rm-host.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de> a écrit:
>> Sill, a different grammar(!) might lead to better visual
>> distinction. (Which words are types' names etc.)
>> A grammatical approach seems a lot better to me than
>> injecting a mechanical sublanguage into identifiers!!!
> There is exactly *no* grammatical approach to this. This is the core of the
> rationals I gave yesterday (or the day before).

(Recent NNTP agents seem to copy Outlook and make readers'
NNTP software present lengthy format=flowed plain text lines.
If, above the text view, one has tabular header views and
a subject listing with sender, date, etc. above, as is
usual, the text lines stretch across the entire window
unless one makes special efforts.  It'll be very kind of
you if you could tick the relevant box in Opera.)

Ada does have grammar to help readers sort
out the role of names in an Ada program.

For example, a word after a ':' (other than "in" etc,
other than a base_literal using obsolescent number sign
colon) is guaranteed to be a type's name. I don't think
this is "no support"?

Can a name placed before ':' be a type at all?
That's a good thing because it remove one decision.

Every "if" requiring context makes the number of
possible interpretations grow exponentially.
Reading effort is higher, which might be not so good.

() is syntactically overloaded. This may or may not be
what you want.

But '.', '=', '*', ... have very few syntactical meanings,
to be determined by context.  So there isn't exactly no
support for telling things apart.

I'll still like to have one name for one thing,
even if a grammar offers other ways to designate the
intended meaning of a name.