From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c1effc80c3046ad X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Subscript brackets Date: 1996/05/02 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 152573960 references: <4m515d$pok@calypso.bns.com.au> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-05-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Mike said "Are there any plans to convert from parentheses to square brackets for array subscripts in Ada?" Apart from the fact that such a change would be a grautitous an serious incompatibility at this stage, it is in fact considered desirable to use parentheses for arrays, and there is no plan at all to change, nor would such a suggestion be seriously entertained. The argument in favor of parentheses is one of uniformity of reference. An array is, from a mathematical point of view, simply a function. There is a special way of implementing the function efficiently, but since at the abstract level it is a function, it should have the same syntax as a function. Of course there is nothing to stop an implementation accepting sqaure bracets as an alternative representation for normal parens (GNAT does so with an error message :-) Finally one cannot take seriously the suggestoni that this is a major barrier to the use of Ada. Ada has, at this level, a quite diferent syntax from the other languages you mention, and there is no intrinsic merit in trying to mirror some other language for the sake of doing so. Indeed even from a pragmatic point of view, such a change makes no sense. You may make an Algol programmer epsilon more comfortable, but you would make a Fortran or COBOL programmer epsilon less comfortable.