Re: Real syntax problems in Ada

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 3:06:41 PM UTC-7, (unknown) wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 28, 2012 4:13:02 AM UTC-4, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
> > What are real problems with Ada syntax as opposed to the imaginary ones
> 
> 
> 
> Not that it's a syntax problem, but I've always been suprised by the choice to use 'all' to explicitly dereference an access value; I don't think a casual reader of the langauge would be able to guess what it does.

It makes some sense if A is an access to a record; then you can say A.abc for component "abc" in the record, A.xyz for component xyz, and A.all for the whole thing, i.e. all components.  Of course, to be consistent, that would mean that if A were an access to an array, we'd use A(2) for the index=2 element, A(2..5) to refer to a slice of the array, and A(all) to refer to the entire array.  Oh well.

                           -- Adam