Re: overload ":=" ???

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

David Morton said, replying to Laurent

>    If you allow programmers to play with assignment, you'll definitly
> damage the readability of all Ada sources.

what about "write-ability" ????


Ah! Interesting you should ask, the answer is we do NOT care at all -- well
that's a little strong, but one of the critical design principles of Ada
is that we always emphasize readability over writability -- why? simple,
we are more interested in maintability than saving a bit of coding time,
since the latter is such a small part of the total life-cycle cost.

I stronly agree with Laurent that allowing general redefinition of assignment
is likely to encourage (mis)uses that would tend to damage readability. Yes,
I know you can argue that allowing redefinition of operators is also a risk,
and indeed I have seen this badly abused on occasion, but I think assignment
is more fundamental. The nice thing about the use of Adjust is that it allows
quite a bit of flexibility without allowing the undesirable introduction of
implicit conversions (or 
something even worse)