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, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,8b8748382fcfacc1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: friend classes in ada95 Date: 2000/04/18 Message-ID: <8dgk3m$aj7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 612512662 References: <38F6B617.34E216A7@emw.ericsson.se> <38F887AE.8CDA24E0@acm.org> <8dc8oi$kda$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38FB8556.4EACD391@earthlink.net> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x43.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Tue Apr 18 03:17:24 2000 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 2000-04-18T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <38FB8556.4EACD391@earthlink.net>, "Robert I. Eachus" wrote: > (To me the silliest of the issues with > such potential was > about whether or not to allow leading underscores in > identifiers...) Silly enough for you to have forgotten the issue :-) The issue was whether to treat underscores as letters in identifiers, removing the restrictions on the use of underscores. Actually the example most often used was a trailing underscore, but the general ability to mirror c identifiers such as a__b was also an issue. > IMHO, the changed to the treatment of abstract made at a later > Boston meeting probably would not have been possible with the > syntax proposed by Jean Ichbiah. That's plain wrong, or a misunderstanding, the notation class type x is record ... as simply a syntactic transformation of type x is tagged record ... is completely neutral with respect to such changes (indeed an Ada 95 compiler today could if it liked accept the first time as a source representation of the second form (though this kind of stretching of the notion of source representation is considered unsporting, even if allowed by the RM :-) To change the meaning of class as a technical > term would require significant additional work by the Language Design > Team--unless they were allowed to unify the existing class hierarchy and > the new class constructs. But this had been explicitly considered and > rejected much earlier in the design process. So those arguing for class > as a keyword had to justify the extra effort. TO use this as an argument against the class syntax suggestion is allowing best to be the enemy of good. The class syntax could perfectly well be introduced without changing the notion of classes. After all, to most Ada 95 programmers type x is tagged record ... introduces a new class called x anyway, sure I know that is not quite right, but there are lots of cases where informal usage does not match the RM :-) Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.