Re: Ideas for Ada 200X "left hand side" repeater.

[Wesley Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com>]

> If one use "is" I would have thought :
> 
>    Screen.Buffer(i) is Pixel in Pixel := Pixel + 1;
> 
> but perhaps this is because of that Norwegian is my language and English
> only the second?

Actually, if one wants to emulate English,

    Pixel is Screen.Buffer(i) in Pixel := Pixel + 1;

would be semantically better.

But it seems to me that renames covers all the "wishes"
so far except two.  And it adds two:

1. With a declare block, one can give the new name as big
    or as small a scope as needed.

2. The new name can be something that logically suits
    the scope it's given.

The two that are not covered:

1. The wish to trim the number of keystrokes to
    an absolute minimum.  As most of us know, that
    is NOT a concern of an Ada fan.

2. The wish to avoid temporaries for a more efficient
    construct.  As has already been said more than once,
    this is a red herring.  It can avoid temporaries
    ONLY if doing so would not break any other language
    rules.  And there is (obviously) no language rule
    requiring the current construct to be less efficient
    than the new one.

3. One point in favor of the new construct is that if
    evaluation had side effects, they would occur once
    instead of twice.  But in that case, instead of
    renames, one would use an initialized variable
    (and copy-back or write-through) or an in out parameter.