"Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote in message 
news:5bc23b42-3a87-463b-b7c8-ab1b426c5191@d10g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
> I'm aware this question in the context of attributes has something
> anecdotal, but this is just I like to use named association as soon as
> there is at least two parameters in a call. So it happens a moment I
> asked to my self � why isn't it possible with attributes � ?
>
> About the weight of this matter, this is anecdotal, that's true
> (pedant is a lot said, think this is about named association, which
> are useful).

The short answer is that Ada 83 didn't allow it (even if they were 
technically functions) because the parameters had no names (as Adam noted, 
there is no profiles for those functions published in the Ada 83 standard).

When it was proposed for Ada 95, I griped about the implementation cost (as 
noted in my original message). Some other implementers agreed with me. When 
the scope reduction was applied to the Ada 9x proposal (the original 
language was just too large for the time, no one would ever have implemented 
it), things that were just "nice to haves" were removed (even if they were 
technically sound). This was in that category, so out it went. Same thing 
happened to conditional expressions and many other useful ideas.

The reasoning hasn't changed, so I don't think we'll be revisiting that any 
time soon.

                                              Randy.