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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Subject: Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
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Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 10:24:09 +0200
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Date: 2010-04-07T10:24:18+02:00
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On Wed, 7 Apr 2010 00:28:22 -0700 (PDT), Maciej Sobczak wrote:

> On 6 Kwi, 10:07, Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homep...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> It is only a pity that there would be no way to overload a function
>> call operator for the parameterless case. ;-)
> 
> Heck, when I think more about this it seems that even this would be
> possible by analyzing the context of the given expression. That would
> work in a similar way as overloading on return types.
> For example, assuming that My_Magic_Type has an overloaded procedure
> call operator and My_Other_Magic_Type has an overloaded function call
> operator:
> 
> declare
>    X : My_Magic_Type;
>    Y : My_Other_Magic_Type;
> begin
>    X;          -- parameterless procedure call on X

A reader would expect this procedure idempotent. Consider a program:

   X; X; X; -- What does this do?

>    A := Y;     -- parameterless function call on Y

I would prefer the ":=" (A, Y); interpretation, here.

>    X (1, 2);   -- procedure call on X with two params

I played with the idea of adding procedural operators. E.g.

   X + 1;

meaning a call to

   procedure "+" (X : in out Foo; Increment : Integer);

>    B := Y (3); -- function call on Y with one param

Better it be ":="(B, "index" (Y, 3));

> end;
> 
> But I'm not really sure if that would be actually useful in the
> context of other Ada features.

The things you could do with your proposal could probably be achieved in
other ways. For example, I considered a "touch" primitive operation, which
similarly to Adjust, to be called each time you access a volatile object in
order to get its value. This could be useful for tracing, interlocking,
garbage collection, persistency layer purposes, etc.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de