Re: Some questions about Ada.

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <Dqt9nA.o5n@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>,
Carl Laurence Gonsalves <clgonsal@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>I've heard about Ada 95. I wasn't able to find any books on it though, so I
>picked up a copy of "Programming in Ada" 3rd Ed. by J.G.P.Barnes. It
>doesn't cover Ada 95 (it's copyright date is '89). 

Barnes has updated his book to cover Ada 95.  There's also Norman
Cohen's book, and probably others.

>...I'll go and look on the
>web for stuff about Ada 95, probably tomorrow, actually.

The Reference Manual and the Rationale can be found at
sw-eng.falls-church.va.us in directory
public/adaic/docs/standard/95lrm_rat/v6.0.

>The
>varying capitalizations that result from different people going in and
>modifying the code results in a distracting mish-mash of capitalization
>styles.

Usually true, because most projects consist of a bunch of
individualistic "artists", who think that writing "end" the same way as
everybody else will cramp their style.  :-(

For a counter-example, look at the GNAT sources.  Stylistically, they
look like they were all written by the same person.  Not just case
conventions, but all kinds of other stuff.

>If it was intended to prevent variables that look similar except for case
>then that's what should've been done: make the language case-sensitive, but
>don't allow the creation of anything that has the same case-insensitive
>name. ie: if I create something called "foo" then I can't create something
>called "Foo", nor can I access something called "foo".

In a language with overloading, you can declare both "foo" and "foo".
If *that*'s not confusing, then how can "Foo" and "foo" be confusing?
In a different article I posted a variation on your idea above, which
IMHO fits in better with the idea of overloading.

I think Smalltalk requires that class names start with a capital letter,
and method names start with a lower-case letter.  Clearly, language-wide
conventions are better than project-wide conventions.

>But I think that isn't a very good restriction. A very common convention in
>C and in other case sensitive languages (like Modula-3) is to give a type
>an upper-case name, and a local general purpose instance of that type has a
>lower-case name. ...

Shrug.  Some folks like that, some folks find it to be an abomination.
I imagine one can get used to either way.

>... I imagine Ada programs are filled with variables called
>"myWindow" or "theTable".

Yes, they are.  Well, actually, it's usually My_Window and The_Table.
Alternatively, some programs are filled with types called Window_Type
and Table_Type, so the variables can be called Window and Table.

Anyway, who cares?  This issue is hardly the most important one, when
choosing a programming language.

- Bob