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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Examples in Docs, was Re: Escape Sequences in Strings
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 03:52:22 GMT
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In article <871yu16d9j.fsf@chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
  Matthew Woodcraft <mattheww@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> I don't know how errata in the Ada standard are dealt with,
> but I can imagine a case where the language designers could
> be stuck with a meaning they didn't intend (making some
> construct effectively unusable, for example), but be unable
> to change it because the standard as published was
> consistent and unambiguous.

This represents a serious misconception, of course the
standards committee can fix errors of this kind, and this
has often occured. No one ever gets "stuck" in a case like
this. You are imagining a problem that simply does not exist.

For example, in the original Ada 83 definition, it was clear
and unambiguous that

  subtype r is range 1 .. 10;

did NOT make r a static subtype. In fact there were essentially
no static subtypes. The definition was clear, consistent, and
unambiguous on this point, but of course this was understood to
be an error (it is indeed interesting to study how this error
arose), and was fixed.

> An example of the construct as they had intended
> it to be used would prevent this occurring.

Very unlikely indeed. Most of the examples are trivial and very
unlikely to be informative in this manner. We HAVE found a
number of cases where the examples were incorrect :-)


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