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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Hungarian notation
Date: 1996/05/23
Message-ID: <dewar.832852187@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 156372487
references: <4adem2$b5s@mercury.IntNet.net> <4n6off$6e2@mikasa.iol.it>
 <3198F30F.2A2@zurich.ibm.com> <DrqsDo.Eu5@eskimo.com>
 <4nsg3f$liu@solutions.solon.com> <31a3b322.442404233@sqarc>
 <4o19k3$o4b@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.modula3,comp.lang.modula2,comp.edu,comp.lang.eiffel
Date: 1996-05-23T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Richard O'Keefe said

"Can anyone explain to me why Ada doesn't have them (function().all isn't
quite the same thing; selectors are usefully restricted)."

If one took all the features that might be added to Ada and applied the
following rule:

"Any feature shall be put in, unless there is a sound technical argument
 that shows that the feature is undesirable"

then Ada would get to be a *really* big argument. In fact early on in the
Ada 95 design, the advocates of more functionality often tried to impose
this rule. The point is that if you only apply this narrow criterion, then
you miss the more important goal of keeping the language as small and simple
as possible, consistent with providing needed functionality.

So Richard, the burden is on you to argue that this feature is vital, not
on others to argue that it is not useful.

One useful viewpoint that I have tried to emphasize in the past is the
following:

  Every feature added to a language damages the language by increasing its
  size (and therefore at least the perceived complexity, if not the actual
  complexity).

  Any new feature added must provide enough benefit to at least offset
  this damage, and in practice must provide a net positive benefit.

If you don't apply this kind of principle, then you quickly find the
language gets full of marginal features.

Richard, my specific answer to your question is simple. This feature simply
would not provide sufficient increase in expressive power to warrant the
additional complexity.

If you want to argue otherwise, give some convincing examples of things
that can be done using selectors and not simply otherwise.