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: 103376,9fb64e4c58f1fe X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: overload ":=" ??? Date: 1996/07/22 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 170317125 references: <4soh73$56h@newsbf02.news.aol.com> <31F1C49D.451B20C1@jinx.sckans.edu> <31F40F0C.3FDACA19@jinx.sckans.edu> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-07-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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)