From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,ac39a12d5faf5b14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-04-21 19:57:40 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Grace and Maps (was Re: Development process in the Ada community) Date: 21 Apr 2002 19:57:40 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0204211857.2bf8b340@posting.google.com> References: <3CB46975.90408@snafu.de> <3CBAFFEE.2080708@snafu.de> <4519e058.0204171036.6f0a7394@posting.google.com> <3CBDD795.4060706@snafu.de> <4519e058.0204180800.44fac012@posting.google.com> <3CBF0341.8020406@mail.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.244 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1019444260 26442 127.0.0.1 (22 Apr 2002 02:57:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 22 Apr 2002 02:57:40 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:22878 Date: 2002-04-22T02:57:40+00:00 List-Id: David Bolen wrote in message news:... > And from another language perspective, in Python, the fundamental > built-in data structure types (aside from numerics) are sequences > (lists/tuples) and mappings (dictionaries) and certainly in my > experience they cover the vast majority of practical situations quite > capably. Yes, and of course this is an old old idea, copied into Python from the heritage of ABC, SETL and other precursors. Mappings are of course powerful enough to represent anything (and sequences are just special cases of mappings). That's been known since long before computers existed! But whether general mappings have a legitimate place in a low level language (by SETL standards :-) like Ada is open for debate. And in particular, having them as second class citizens without decent syntax seems quite dubious. So you might want to throw into the pot user defined subscripting and slicing operations :-) My own view is that it is unlikely that any of this will get anywhere near smooth enough and with enough consensus to be standardized. I think people would better spend their effort implementing sample packages than discussing at random on CLA :-)