Re: Clear Screen

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

   RKBD said:

  > I argued strongly against the whole idea of Annex J, but I lost (and
  > surprisingly, I was in a small minority here. But I let it go because
  > this is a documentation issue only!

    (And I lost on one in the formal vote--pragma Elaborate--but won
later when the Development Team actually checked out the issue.  My
guess is that in about 30% of the cases where pragma Elaborate
actually needed, it can't be replaced by Elaborate_Body or
Elaborate_All.  But I suspect the real reason it was left in Chapter
10 was that it only requires a few words there. ;-)

  > The features in annex J are fully supported in Ada 95, and are tested
  > by the ACVC suite, and must be fully supported in all Ada 95 compilers.
  > They may be used freely in Ada 95 programs -- some people may feel for
  > aesthetic reasons that they want to avoid the use of annex J features,
  > but that's a bed they make for themselves...

  > Sure, there are some people who harbour the fantasy that the annex
  > J features will be eliminated in Ada 0X (these must be the same
  > people who thought the ALTER verb could be removed from COBOL-8X)
  > but in practice the compatibility argument will be *stronger* next
  > time around, not weaker, so these features are not about to
  > disappear!

    There are SOME Annex J features which will probably disappear next
time around: the allowed substitution characters and the chapter 13
stuff (with the possible exception of interrupt entries).  But some of
the stuff there, including package Ascii and the package renamings, will
probably be around in Ada 3x.

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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