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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Not intended for use in medical,
Date: 1997/05/12
Message-ID: <dewar.863447890@merv>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 241100002
References: <3.0.32.19970423164855.00746db8@mail.4dcomm.com>
 <3374C19F.15FE@sprintmail.com> <dewar.863323812@merv>
 <3375EBA0.777A@sprintmail.com> <EA1Gwr.8F0@world.std.com>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-12T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Robert Duff said

<<You're right -- T'Min and T'Max only barely made it into the language.
It's one of those features that have a very small benefit, and a very
small cost (in terms of added complexity and so forth).  And that
combination quite often causes huge arguments about whether the
cost/benefit ratio is good enough.>>

One thing here is to compare

   if A > B then
      longname := A;
   else
      longname := B;
   end if;

   with

   longname := longname + 1;

and look at the substitutions:

   longname := x'Max (A,B);
   x'Incr (longname);

note that in either case we are adding the type name to the syntax. It sure
looks like the argument for syntactic sugar is far stronger in the Max case
than the Incr case, this gets even more so if you consider:

    Func (X'max (a,b), Y'max (c,d));

where the unsugared version is

    declare
       temp1 : x;
       temp2 : y;
    begin
       if a > b then
          temp1 := a;
       else
          temp1 := b;
       end if;
       if c > d then
          temp2 := c;
       else
          temp2 := d;
       end if;
       Func (temp1, temp2);
    end;

The fact that we do not have a conditional expression form in Ada makes
the sweetness of the Max/Min sugar noticable. In Algol-68, we have no
max or min, but we can write

    Func ((a > b | a | b), (c > d | c | d));

which is not too awful, and of course you have a similar notation in C.

So this should explain why the argument is bogus (the argument that
says "hey, you have Max/Min, so why not Incr/Decr).
i