Re: Other Ada Standards (was Re: SIGada Conference)

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Russ <18k11tm001@sneakemail.com> wrote:
: Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message news:<3FEB047A.1040100@noplace.com>...
:> I don't know how difficult it would be in reality - to some extent that 
:> may be compiler-dependent. The point is, the cost isn't "Zero", the 
:> problem it purports to fix doesn't look like a problem - or at least a 
:> trivial problem and given the limited resources there are available for 
:> standards changes, we'd be better off dedicating those resources to some 
:> effort that is more significant.

Yes. Good data structure libraries for example :-)

I'd rather read "with This.That;" and only go back to reading "use
This.That;" when I cannot resolve some identifier.  "with and use"
is just in the way then. Think of context clauses compared to
a table of contents or an index in a book.  Will "with and use"
really help guiding your eyes in finding the interesting units of
information if you have to read the following?

mmmm A.Nice.Lib;
mmmm mmm mmm Another.Kind;
mmmm Tremendous;
mmmm Yet.Another.One;
mmmm mmm mmm Zebras.Tedious;

As opposed to for example

mmmm A.Nice.Lib;
mmmm Another.Kind;       mmm Another.Kind;
mmmm Tremendous;
mmmm Yet.Another.One;
mmmm Zebras.Tedious;     mmm Zebras.Tedious;

Incidentally, with short package names there are no character
savings in the "with and use" case, because "and " may well need more
characters than the repeated package names plus ';' and ' '.

:> Georg Bauhaus wrote:
:> > 
:> > I don't think, after reading what Robert Duff, Robert Eachus, and
:> > Marin Condic have written, that we can say this is small/tiny,
:> > that is big. On what basis? Because something _looks_ tiny to us
:> > non-compiler writers?

: For crying out loud, I could do it myself in 30 minutes,
: and that includes 10 minutes to think about it and another 10 minutes
: to test it!

At least for the "implies" case, I couldn't even list the pieces of the
language definition that will have to be taken into consideration.
Congratulations :-) How about overloading, generics, use in bodies,
private library units, use inside subprograms, etc etc... Or do you
suggest that the number of rules in the language be increased
for special cases in order to cater for *less verbosity* in in Ada?

For the "with and use" case, what is your interpretation of
"with and use A.B;"
Is it "with A.B; use A.B;" or is it "with A; use A.B;"?
Which interpretation is to be chosen?

(And You seem to have access to a fast machine when it translates
a compiler and runs all tests within 10 minutes, in all required
configurations. Provided the tests have been written within the
30 minutes allocated for the implementation of the language change. :-)

: Whatever option you ultimately choose, please do yourselves a favor
: and get rid of the double naming that clutters so many Ada source
: files.

Could you give an account in percent of what, in your experience,
adds the most clutter? Like for example
1) spaghetti module design, implying a large number of context items
2) unfavourable formatting of context items
3) double naming
4) ...

: When you pass Bob, do you say, "Hi, Bob. How are you, Bob?" or
: do you say, "Hi, how are you, Bob?".

I don't think that this natural language greeting is a valid analogy
for a formal language "need specification". The phrase "with Bob;"
is different in meaning from "use Bob;" in Ada. But the two occurences
of "Bob" in the above greeting do not appear in different (natural
language) context, assuming that both "Hi" and "How are you"
provide conventional forms/parts of greeting.  (Even if "How are you"
is a question where "Hi" rarely is.) They both share rituality,
and besides they do not say anything about the visibility of
Bob's features at all. So what's the point?  Ada is not a natural
language, with and use have different uses in Ada than in English,
AFAICT.


-- Georg