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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: miniscences
Date: 1998/01/17
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Nick asks

<<I do a lot of training of Ada programmers (no more jokes about the blind
leading the blind, please :-}.  I shall have to add this one to the list
(it gets longer and longer :-|  You say this is an old idiom: how old?
>>

As old as the Ada design. During the Green design effort (i.e. late 70's),
the issue of whether to have implicit conversions was discussed, and at
that time Jean felt, and others generally agreed, that the use of the "+"
operator in this way meant that you have the possibility of making the
conversion pretty close to silent from a reading point of view, and that
therefore it was not necessary to introduce implicit convresions.

After all, look at the number of people who find even the + too silent,
and would prefer to see a full identifier here. Imagine the situation
in a langyuage like C++ with implicit conversions where you can have
a lot going on behind the scenes with no syntactic hint at all.