Re: Why is it Called a Package?

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

Robert, the context of Bob Duff's message was the discussion of a new 
Ada variant without the constraint of backward compatibility. I was 
certainly not proposing revisiting Ada's syntax! I'm surprised that you 
read it that way. Perhaps I should have called it Bab or something else
:-)

Given the character set restrictions, wasn't the issue of "[]" pretty much 
a foregone conclusion?

Yes, uder defined overloadings of [] is a semantic issue, but I wouldn't 
think it a good idea if () were used for functions and arrays. I don't 
like C++'s "()" overloading, only the "[]" one.

-- Brian

On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Robert Dewar wrote:

> In article
> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0004061305320.6588-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
>   Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> 
> > I think if the syntax were to be redone I'd like the issue of
> "()" versus
> > "[]" for array indexing to be reexamined. Then we could also
> think about
> > some syntactic sugar for overloading "[]" as in C++. The
> restrictions on
> > the character set that were part of the original Ada
> requirements don't
> > make a lot of sense to me now, though the restriction to ASCII
> is OK.
> 
> 
> There is no point in revisiting this, because nothing has
> changed since Ada 95. The reason for not differentiating
> [] vs () has to do with referential transparency (i.e.
> arrays are conceptually like functions) not with character
> set restrictions.
> 
> Yes, there are arguments on both sides.
> 
> Yes, these arguments are well known since 1960
> 
> Yes, these arguments were brought up during the Ada design
> 
> No, they did not convince people that [] is a good idea
> 
> No, nothing has changed that would suggest revisiting this issue
> 
> The question of overloading indexing is of course a completely
> separate one, since this is not a matter of syntax but
> semantics, and is thus completely orthogonal.
> 
> 
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