Re: Language Design Mistakes (was "not intended...")

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

Bob Duff said

<<In Ada 80, you could say "raise T'Failure;", for any task T.  This was a
lot like "abort T;", except that T could handle it (using an exception
handler).  This feature has a lot in common with Ada 95's "select...then
abort...".>>

And one of the reasons that it was rejected was that it was impossible
to implement without a lot of distributed overhead.

The Ada 95 select .. then abort ... also introduces the same kind of
distributed overhead, but this time around, this overhead did not seem
to bother people (somewhat inexplicably if you ask me -- this is my least
favorite feature of Ada 95 -- and we have noticed repeatedly that people
use this construct without any idea of what the consequences are, not only
on efficiency, but more particularly on program structure, and they are easily
argued out of using it!)