Re: Does Ada need elemental functions to make it suitable for scientific work?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Thursday, July 19, 2012 6:56:20 PM UTC-7, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> 
> For instance, there has been a long controversy about using unary "+" as a 
> short-hand conversion operator. That was its original intent

It was?  Interesting.  I thought it was just there for "completeness" and because other languages did the same thing--specifically, I think Pascal and Algol have unary *non-overloadable* "+" operators that don't really serve any purpose except for mathematical types to put into their alternating Taylor series computations or something:

   if mod(N,2) = 0 then Term := +(X**2)/Factorial(N)
                   else Term := -(X**2)/Factorial(N);

But my memory about those other languages could be wrong.  Anyway, if overloading was the reason unary "+" was kept in Ada 83, that's an interesting fact I wouldn't have guessed. 

                          -- Adam