>The empty parens are not allowed in Ada.  Bob Eachus or someone else might 
>be able to give some of the rationale.  It's a case similar to the choice 
>of () for array indexing rather than [].  In Ada, a function result is 
>considered conceptually similar to a constant, as are enumeration 
>literals, and many of the same rules apply to them and their use.  I 
>suspect the syntax is intended to reinforce this.


I suspect that the use of () instead of [] has more to do with 7-bit
character sets for European languages. See
	http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83rat/html/ratl-02-01.html
and ISO 646. Same problem that gave us C trigraphs


-- 
	mac the na�f