Re: Question for the folks who designed Ada95

["Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.no>]

Robert Dewar wrote :

>What we do in GNAT to address this problem is to make the
>shift operators intrinsics. Here is a typical declaration
>from the Interfaces spec:
>
>   pragma Import (Intrinsic, Shift_Left);
>
>The nice thing about this approach is that indeed you
>*can* apply this intrinsic to a user defined type. For
>example you can put the following in your code.
>
>
>  type My_Modular is mod 2**Integer'Size;
>  function Shift_Left
>     (Value  : My_Modular;
>      Amount : Natural)
>      return   My_Modular;
>  pragma Import (Intrinsic, Shift_Left);


I think the person who asked the question whould have preferred something that
was inline instead of a function call. At least that would _look_ efficient.

>and this will work fine. Of course this is not guaranteed
>to be portable (perhaps the ARG should look at this one,
>since it is a perfectly legitimate implementation
>decision).


While you are at it, why not get us [ and ] for arrays (in addtion to, not
instead of parenthesises). I really want to write a[4] := 3 instead of a(4) :=
3.

I know that when Ada 83 was defined one could not rely on [ and ] being
available (Pascal used (. and .) instead of [ and ] if my memory serves me
right). However these days I see no reason not to comply with the common use of
square brackets with arrays.

Arrays as functions? Since when could you assign to a function??

Greetings,