Re: Two ideas for the next Ada Standard

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

Jonas Nygren <jonas@joy.ericsson.se> writes:
>Coming from a C/C++ background I have had a hard time to adjust to
>many of the Ada features (geez, I have never casted so much before in
>my programming life).

This puzzles me greatly.  I've been hacking Ada for about two years now,
and *except when trying to interface to C code* find that I have very
few conversions.  (I take it that "casted"---IS there such a word
form?---refers to conversions.)  It would be interesting to know what
you are doing that makes conversion common.

>Still, there are some things I have a problem to adjust to. One is 
>P(X) instead of the popular X.P notation. 

The Pop family of languages has always identified F(X) and X.F.
Are you are happy to see x.sqrt.print instead of print(sqrt(x))?
If not, _why_ not?  In Smalltalk, after all, sqrt _is_ a method in
the floating point class...

Algol 68 and COBOL use "field OF record" instead of "record.field".
Is that _really_ such a big deal?

Hmm.  It would be interesting to determine the preferences of
 - people whose native language is SVO, like English
    Prediction: subject.method(object) preferred.

 - people whose native language is VSO
    Prediction:  method(subject, object) preferred

 - people whose native language is SOV (isn't Japanese like that?)
    Prediction:  somewhere in between the others.

I suppose it won't do any good to point out that the Ada approach
generalises nicely to overloaded operators, while the C++ approach
requires some ad hack kluging?

>E.g. I can not understand why one cannot have an anonymous access
>argument which refers to a constant, e.g P(X : access CONSTANT XT).
>Why not? What ever could have been said against this? Premature?

What exactly does this buy you that an "in" argument doesn't buy you?
It looks _awfully_ like a demand that Ada look like C++ (const ref).

>So please let us keep on 'BS'ing on our favourite issues irregardless
>if Robert Dewar tells us to 'shut up'. It would be more fun if Robert
>and others who have been involved in the standardisation process for
>Ada95 either said we excluded/included this feature because of this or
>that or perhaps say we overlooked that feature.

To some extent this is true, but as someone who uses GNAT every day
I don't want to see too much of Robert Dewar's time diverted from 
enhancing an already *wonderful* tool.  And his postings are already
darned productive (even when he disagrees with me).

-- 
Australian citizen since 14 August 1996.  *Now* I can vote the xxxs out!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.