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From: aek@vib.usr.pu.ru (Alexander Kopilovitch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: The old "Object.Method" syntax debate
Date: 23 May 2003 11:35:48 -0700
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Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
>Anyway prefix syntax exists also in the form of attributes.

Yes, but attributes cannot be introduced by user -- sometimes programmer can 
provide an implementation of an attribute, but isn't permitted to introduce
his own attribute... this is a privilege for language designers and compiler
vendors.
(An apostrophe often is no more visible that a dot, but its upper position
in the line suggests that the following attribute somehow came from a high
authority -:) .

> Strangely 
>enough, that nobody has yet proposed to replace X'Length with X.Length. It 
>would so OO-O-Oh! (:-))

That's because the nature of attributes is so mystifying (it seems that there
are no description of what is an attribute in general, neither in ARM nor in
Rationale; and Ada books, such as Barnes's and Cohen's also do not define
precisely the general notion of attribute in Ada).


Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia