Re: prefix of dereference must be a name?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:04:56 -0400, Stephen Leake wrote:

> Looking in the annotated language reference manual, I find this in
> 4.1, about what could be allowed as the prefix for .all:
> 
> 17.f
>           Discussion: Actually, it would be reasonable to allow any
>           primary in front of .all, since only the value is needed, but
>           that would be a bit radical.
> 
> I guess that makes me a radical, which is nothing new :).
>
> And yesterday's "radical" is today's "progressive". That note is from
> the Ada 95 changes; time to move on!

Talking  about radicalism it would be much better to remove ".all" where an
object of target type is expected.

   A.all := C + B;  -- Unambiguous

> But as you say, I want more than a primary, I want an expression. Hmm.
> "primary" includes "qualified_expression". That would save me from
> declaring Copy above. Although when things are class-wide the necessary
> type qualifier can be quite long.
> 
> I still don't see the fundamental problem.

Huh, it is the same problem as here:

   Two := ("A" & "B")'Length; -- Illegal

too RADICAL ! (:-))

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de