Re: ada paper critic

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

As an Ada True Believer in good standing and one who has used the language
for a long number of years, I can honestly say that I cannot recall ever
having decided to change an array reference into a function call, or the
other way around. Maybe its just me. Maybe it was the application domains I
have worked in. But generally, by the time I got to coding something up, the
architecture of the program was pretty well a fixed decision and arrays
stayed arrays and functions stayed functions. So maybe I just can't see why
its such a big deal that arrays and functions have the same syntax - or for
that matter why they should have separate syntax.

Maybe in theory its better for Ada to have "A [X]" and "F (X)" syntax. Maybe
in theory its worse. But it sure seems like if this is in any way a wart -
its a *really* small one. I can't think of any practical circumstances in
which it would have ever made the least bit of difference to me had Ada done
it differently. Certainly, there have to be bigger issues with Ada than just
some superficial syntax like this?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Brian Rogoff" <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net> wrote in message
news:Pine.BSF.4.40.0206171944480.93931-100000@bpr.best.vwh.net...
>
> > I am an (ex-)C programmer too, and most part of the time I complain
about
> > sitting hours before large trees of code and change occourences of a[b]
> > into a(i) because a became a function instead of an array. ;-)
>
> That may be, but any Ada True Believer will chant that in Ada, we don't
> give a !@#$ for the writer of programs, we only care about the reader.
>