Re: Question for the folks who designed Ada95

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com>]

In article <7g8390$225c@drn.newsguy.com>,
  bill@nospam wrote:

> All what we know, is that looking at something written as
> a[i] tells  right away that it is an array, while with
> a(i) you are not sure what it is in Ada.
>
> If I am maintaining someone else's code, it helps me to
> understand the code faster that way.

This seems a very weak argument to me. It is only narrowly
separated from the peculiar thinking that leads to people
actually liking so-called Hungarian notion in which type
information is encoded in variable names.

I must say (as someone who slightly favors [] just because
of familiarity) that I have never seen well written code
with well chosen names where this kind of confusion arose.
Maybe bill@nospam is too used to reading junk code which
is not well written in this sense :-)

You dismiss arguments as being to "language lawyer" but
that may mean you don't fully understand them. In fact
the referential transparency argument is a strong one.
If you don't see that, then you are definitely missing
something (in general in a technical argument if you cannot
argue both sides of an issue, it means you don't understand
it well enough to be arguing :-)

You can still decide that the RT argument is not strong
enough to win out, but to dismiss it means you are missing
something.

P.S. The notion that everything should be done with
messages makes as much sense as any fad (e.g. purely
applicative programming with no assignments, single
assignment languages, dataflow languages, purely
functional programming, pure logic programming) etc
all these are useful techniques, but when you try to
say they are the ONLY technique that should be used
you are treading on dangerous ground.

By the way, please don't get abstract data types and
objects mixed up in your mind (such a common mistake
for C++ programmers to make, not surprising given the
design of the language). Yes, data abstraction is
definitely a powerful tool, one that has very wide
applicability, as has been known for at least 30 years.
The notion of object oriented programming (also of course
known for over 30 years -- remember the language name is
Simula 67 :-) is also a powerful tool, but they are not
by any means synonymous.

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