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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7d533acec91ae16 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: Question for the folks who designed Ada95 Date: 1999/04/27 Message-ID: <7g4mrs$v5n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 471494716 References: <7g2qu4$ca4$1@usenet.rational.com> <7g3b5g$p92$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7g4ae3$hjh2@ftp.kvaerner.com> <3725C49E.8106A44B@aasaa.ofe.org> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x12.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Tue Apr 27 15:58:54 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-04-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <3725C49E.8106A44B@aasaa.ofe.org>, David Starner wrote: > But that was a deliberate choice. IIRC, Ada 83 depended > on ASCII which supplied [], so they could have gone with > brackets. This is bad history! The requirement for the character set in Ada 83 was much more strenuous, it included compatibility with current common usage, which included EBCDIC (e.g. IBM keypunches) which did NOT provide the [] characters. But even now there are those who do not like at all to create referential non-transparency between arrays and functions, since they regard these as two alternative low level implementations of the abstract mathematical concept of a function or map. In other words: a(5) is a reference to a mapping, and you want the range value given the domain value 5. Whether this is implemented by an array or a function is an implementation detail that should not affect the syntactic form of reference. I personally like the [] since I was immersed in the Algol world so long, and I particularly liked this usage in A68, but the above argument is definitely a legitimate one! -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own