Re: was Re: Ada / C++ comparison paper anymore

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Seems like a lot of complexity and work to get something that doesn't have
much nutritional value anyway. I just barely find it sometimes more useful
to say: "X := Integer'Succ (X);" than to say: "X := X + 1;" and I don't
think it contributes that much to readability, reliability or anything else.
Being able to say: "X := Integer'Succ (X, 2);" doesn't seem to have hardly
any value at all and would make ridiculous looking thing such as you cite
possible.

I just can't remember the last time I wanted to increment by something other
than one where a feature like this would be at all useful. Most cases would
degenerate into something more generally mathematical anyway. Even in
developing C code, I don't find many instances where it is useful to use the
"+=" operator to think that somehow my life would be so much easier if only
I had something similar in Ada.

Why put the compiler writers through all that effort (time that could be
spent incorporating a standard container library? :-) unless there's some
glaring hole that needs to be filled? When talking about language extensions
we probably should remember that the vendor's time can only go so far & we
ought to think in terms of priorities so we get the most additional benefit
from that time.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:sMrU7.5902$XC5.7817@www.newsranger.com...
>
> Actually, 'Succ already does this, but it is a function and doesn't have
an
> amount. Perhaps if it took an amount, this would be sufficient? But then
again,
> 'Succ works on enumerated types too, which would have us use something
> nonsensical like "Month'Succ (Current_Month, February)" to bump the value
by 2
> enumerations.
>