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: <7g4tqn$5vk$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 471535104 References: <7g2qu4$ca4$1@usenet.rational.com> <7g4jqm$1rkg@news1.newsguy.com> <7g4mic$1sr0@news2.newsguy.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x14.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 17:57:45 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 <7g4mic$1sr0@news2.newsguy.com>, Samuel Mize wrote: > If you have to worry about line-by-line efficiency, you > really have to cuddle up to your compiler and learn a lot > about it. The issue here (as described in detail in the AARM) has nothing whatsoever to do with compiler or runtime efficiency, it is purely a semantic concern). Here is the full quote from the AARM if people do not have it at hand: <> 9.a Reason: We considered making shifting and rotating be primitive operations of all modular types. However, it is a design principle of Ada that all predefined operations should be operators (not functions named by identifiers). (Note that an early version of Ada had "abs" as an identifier, but it was changed to a reserved word operator before standardization of Ada 83.) This is important because the implicit declarations would hide non-overloadable declarations with the same name, whereas operators are always overloadable. Therefore, we would have had to make shift and rotate into reserved words, which would have been upward incompatible, or else invent new operator symbols, which seemed like too much mechanism. <> This seems quite straightforward and convincing! -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own