Re: Initialization and Finalization of limited object "returned" by a function

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Feb 12, 7:15 am, Robert A Duff <bobd...@shell01.TheWorld.com>
wrote:

> No, it should be syntactic.  And it should be more obvious
> than counting the number of expressions between "(" and ")".
>
> Aggregates should use "[" and "]", so there's no confusion.
> An empty aggregate would be "[ ]", and a singleton
> would be "[X]".  As far as I know, the only reason
> this wasn't done was because of keyboards/character sets
> that didn't have those characters.  But that's a bogus
> reason -- it could be done just like the stuff in J.2.

I thought it was because of keypunch machines!  Yes, there were still
a few of those around when Ada was first designed.

I also remember some of the attempted rationalizations at the time; in
particular, why did Ada use parentheses for both subprogram calls and
array indexing, when other popular languages (Pascal and C) used
square brackets for indexing.  Someone came up with an argument that
it was actually a good thing to use the same characters for both,
because then if your program uses Arr(Index), where Arr is an array,
you could redesign your program to make "Arr" a function and the
change would be transparent.  That seemed like a stretch at the time.

Now that the language requires compilers to allow identifiers
containing any character in any alphabet that exists or has ever
existed, including ancient languages like Ogham (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham --- seriously, I'm dying to use an
Eamhancholl in one of my variable names), there doesn't seem to be
much justification for avoiding square and curly brackets, besides
inertia.  No, you don't want use so many special characters that your
program starts to look like Egyptial hieroglyphics---or worse, a C++
program---but I do think that allowing the sort of syntax you suggest
for aggregates would be a plus.

                                    -- Adam