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From: dmitry6243@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Valued procedures
Date: 1999/01/21
Message-ID: <786pfu$1vb$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1
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Date: 1999-01-21T00:00:00+00:00
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Hi All!

I do not want to restart this weary thread again. Just a question: was the
following alternative (which seems to be a good compromise with rigouristic
point of view) ever considered:

Let's allow, for instance:

    procedure SideEffect (X: in out State) return Boolean;  -- Valid

but

    function SideEffect (X: in out State) return Boolean;   -- Invalid

Further, I believe it should be possible to ignore the result of a procedure.
(Using Ada bindings would be much less painful and produce clearer code if you
were not forced to declare tonns of dummy variables just to ignore various
unused results.) So that either

(a) SideEffect (TheState);

    would be valid, or

(b) the null statement could have a form:

    null <any-expression>;    -- The result is explicitly ignored

Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov

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