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From: "Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.no>
Subject: Re: Question for the folks who designed Ada95
Date: 1999/04/29
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Date: 1999-04-29T00:00:00+00:00
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Robert Dewar wrote :
>There is no such *common* convention. There are *two*
>common conventions in this case () and [], and plenty
>of examples of languages using both (for example, Fortran,
>PL/1, COBOL, Ada, all use (), and Algol derived languages
>tend to use []).

I forgot about cobol and fortran. It's been a long time since I have anything
in either.
>
>But to call one of these common is simply tunnel vision.
>You cannot argue this point on the basis of what is common.
>Sure, for a given person (I assume you grew up in a C
>heritage) one usage may seem more natural [the brackets
>seem more natural to me because I am used to them from
>Algol-68], but that's not a useful way to argue.

I grew up with Pascal (UCSD and Turbo).

>The referential transparency argument is a quite reasonable
>one, and your assignment example does not refute it!


That was not the argument which the example was supposed to refute. The
argument was about the view of an array as a function. I was hoping that nobody
would remember the referential transparancy argument.

While it is a valid argument it is just as weak as any other argument since
things subject to such use should be wrapped in a (inlined) function in the
first place.


Greetings,