Re: Ada Idioms Progress Preview

[tmoran@acm.org]

Perhaps Ada should not have idioms.  An idiom makes no sense to someone
who doesn't know it, eg "He lost his marbles".  Unless it's so well
known that you can guarantee that a maintenance programmer will
recognize it, you shouldn't be, and shouldn't have to be, using it.
What's really wanted, I think, is a set of "here's how you use
Ada features to accomplish this purpose" techniques.  The declare
block, for instance, is clear to someone seeing it for the first
time, but doesn't spring to mind for a new Ada programmer wondering
how to locally suppress checking, or how to save a string of
unknown length.