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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: ObjectAda vs Gnat -- bugs
Date: 1997/05/24
Message-ID: <EApBzG.AzH@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 243666003
References: <EA93C3.CF4@thomsoft.com> <EAAIBG.A7s@world.std.com>
 <3385E9F1.2915@gsfc.nasa.gov>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-24T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <3385E9F1.2915@gsfc.nasa.gov>,
Stephen Leake  <Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:
>This is one reason why it is important to give references (to the
>reference manual, and/or the rationale) when you say "Ada 95 lets you do
>X". Those of us still learning need to go read the RM, to get more
>familiar with it. Or provide a reference to a popular book.

OK.  See RM-6.4(12) and 6.5(21).  And AARM-6.5(24.d) explains why.  The
fact that you can rename function results is just a side-effect -- it
wasn't the original purpose of the change.

Probably the language would be cleaner if every expression denoted an
object, and if the syntactic distinction between 'name' and 'expression'
were removed.  We considered doing that, but it seemed like a lot of
change for little benefit.

It would also be *useful*, in at least one case: I've sometimes wanted
to use a qualified_expression as an object name -- the purpose was to
resolve some otherwise-ambiguous name, but I couldn't do it, because I
didn't want the *value* of that object.

- Bob