Re: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

Hyman Rosen wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> However, I am pretty aware that all unsolved problems with
>> assignment/construction in Ada will inevitable show themselves for
>> Set_Element.
> 
> Have you tried C++?

Surely. I have developed a whole class library with strings, dynamic arrays 
etc.

> In C++ you can provide an indexing operation
> for a class (operator[]) that sounds just like what you want.

Nope.

First of all, there is no contract. I want the compiler be aware that it is 
going to be an array and check if it is.

Secondly to make A[i]=X working you have to use a reference. Now, let I a 
have a packed bit array. What would be a reference to a bit? You would need 
to build a fat pointer class to fix this. The array has to represent an 
image in the video buffer. It has to be damn FAST. And where are 
multidimensional arrays in C++? And where are slices? Well, for them we 
need another class, etc. And what if A is a hash table, sparse array. It 
would be monstrous. And I want it on the stack!

IMO. The idea of treating

A[i]=X;

as

Assign (Index (A, i), X);

is a wrong one.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de