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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,57f8540942f8e060 X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.glorb.com!news2.glorb.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: "(see below)" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Initialization and Finalization of limited object "returned" by a function Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:10:02 +0000 Message-ID: References: <41b794ec-26b0-485e-a959-580a5b877a3b@f15g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <8e09c20d-172e-42a2-b2ff-994863893523@h12g2000yql.googlegroups.com> <9c2b5c56-7abf-4523-844d-b48447587402@w27g2000pre.googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net N2l0TPfowd4tp6wnd3M+xQl/Vmmh49Oe/cSMxpnS76bT3RObKv Cancel-Lock: sha1:+s5vb0ykS8/u/dzK/GkW4uRUfL8= User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/12.20.0.090605 Thread-Topic: Initialization and Finalization of limited object "returned" by a function Thread-Index: AcqsFvotAhTRc2Ieg06IWBBhySoTXw== Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:9183 Date: 2010-02-12T19:10:02+00:00 List-Id: On 12/02/2010 16:57, in article 9c2b5c56-7abf-4523-844d-b48447587402@w27g2000pre.googlegroups.com, "Adam Beneschan" wrote: > 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. Douglas T. Ross, the author of AED-0, was keen on the idea of "uniform referent" notation, i.e., using the form F(X) for a function call, an array element, or the field F of record X (as in Algol W). I think it had some merit, although much diminished by the invention of opaque/private types. -- Bill Findlay chez blueyonder.co.uk