Re: Ada Idioms Progress Preview

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> writes:

>>c) Gadzooks! What on earth does that mean, let me reach for the LRM.
>>Ah, yes, finally figured it out -- to clever for me!
>
> Out of curiosity, which category would you place the "Rosen Trick" in? 

(b), I think.  It's necessary to implement memoizing transparently,
and useful in other ways, too.

> It might be farily clear to an Ada expert what the code does, but
> without extensive commenting (or knowledge of the trick) it would be
> rather tough to figure out why someone would go through all that
> trouble.

The trick per se is not very hard to grok, I think.  In my opionen,
it's surprising that this construction is necessary, and that it is
indeed valid Ada.  To figure out the last two things, you need
probably some expertise, but this is not necessary to understand the
idiom and use it.

After all, do you know the origins of all the English idioms you're
using? ;-)