Re: Exclamation Operator Question

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

iJohn Herro said

<<     Yes, you can always use ! in place of a vertical bar.  But keep in
mind that there's been some talk of eliminating that feature in Ada 0Y
("Ada, oh why?").  If they do that, they'll probably also eliminate pairs
of % as string delimiters and pairs of : to specify a number base.
- John Herro
Software Innovations Technology
http://members.aol.com/AdaTutor
ftp://members.aol.com/AdaTutor>>


Anyone who thinks it is feasible to make gratuitous deletions from a langauge
definition like this in a subsequent standard has not followed the trials
and tribulations of ALTER in COBOL.

I would not worry, after all the design team wanted to remove these
duplicate characters this time around, and several non-English speaking
countries read the riot act!

They did end up in Annex J, but despite the design team's fond wishes, I
would not offer a requiem for any of these features yet (I and several
others thought the whole business of annex J was silly, but we were in
a minority -- the reason I did not like it was that it causes people
(and even implementors and writers of ACVC tests) confusion, because they
are not clear that these are 100% first class fully-normative features in
Ada 95.