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From: mike@calypso.bns.com.au (Michael Talbot-Wilson)
Subject: Subscript brackets
Date: 1996/04/30
Message-ID: <4m515d$pok@calypso.bns.com.au>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 152446250
organization: Calypso & That Jazz
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Are there any plans to convert from parentheses to square brackets
for array subscripts in Ada?

Maybe this is a minor point, and I guess BASIC, PL/I and FORTRAN
programmers think it's better as it is.  (And I guess the use of
parentheses reflects that Ada's heritage is in those languages.)

But C, Pascal, Modula-2 and (if there are any left alive) ALGOL
programmers feel the reverse.  Minor or not, it is a big psycho-
logical hurdle to adjust to something inferior (and even the FAQ
concedes that this is a broken feature) in the name of doing things
better.

A preprocessor which converted just these parentheses to brackets
and left non-array-subscript parentheses alone would allow
existing source to be compiled.  And (I guess) remove the ambiguities
of parsing this feature from the compiler, allowing its cost to
be more clearly seen.

It there any intention of doing this?  Is there any suggested date
when it might happen?  I think some people who would like to convert
to or start working in Ada would like a date to aim at, supposing it
is ever going to happen.

-- Mike