Re: Why no Ada.Wide_Directories?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:1l7zxjcrre04c.1taw8dtwqpkkh.dlg@40tude.net...
...
> Not necessary, you can skip my moans and get right to the response:
>
> "The change .......(fill as appropriate)........ could break existing Ada
> programs, which is unacceptable, unless the cases when it would make Ada
> look more like Java, LISP, Perl, ....(put a disgusting language 
> here).....,
> but it does not."
>
> (:-))

This is correct :-), with the exception of the "unless". All of the changes 
that make Ada look more like some "disgusting language" don't break any 
existing programs. We wouldn't have made the change otherwise.

The few changes that could break existing programs are all about doing what 
we believe Ada was meant to do (such as properly composing "="); none of 
them have anything to do with looking like some other language. (I'm 
presuming that you are talking about things like prefix calls and 
conditional expressions here.)

In addition, the new "indexing" sugar is intended to get us closer to your 
ideal of a fully abstract interface for arrays. It should make it possible 
to define a strongly typed Unicode_String that could have alternate 
implementations for different representations. (We don't yet have a good way 
to get literals for private types, a problem that we've never been able to 
solve although we haven't tried as hard as we should have.)

                                       Randy.