Re: fyi, very interesting Ada paper OOP vs. Readability

[BrianG <me@null.email>]

On 05/30/2012 03:29 AM, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> On 12-05-30 04:09 , BrianG wrote:
>> On 05/11/2012 08:37 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>>> Ada should have had a "conversion" operator ("#" has been proposed), and
>>> clearly Ada.Strings.Unbounded should use it. But that gets shot down
>>> every
>>> time it is proposed (and it has been proposed for every language
>>> revision
>>> other than Ada 2012); mainly because a minority think that "+" is
>>> perfectly
>>> good for that. And another minority think that uses "+" on non-numeric
>>> types
>>> is *disgusting*, so we can never get the operators added to packages. A
>>> perfect impasse.
>>>
>>> Randy.
>> Why not unary "&", isn't that closer to the existing syntax?
>>
>
> Please, not "&", that would make calls look too much like calls in C
> with pointer parameters. "&" being the C "address-of" operator. "&" is
> also a large glyph, as tall as upper-case letters, making a following
> identifier harder to recognize at a glance. How about "~"? Meaning, I
> want "approximately" this value, but converted as necessary.
>
So I guess we should ban 'C' as a variable name too.  Who cares what 
looks like C?  Does that somehow bring along with it the problems in C? 
  How?

We already have A := "This" & " That", Why not also B := &"The other", 
that makes it perfectly analogous with D := 1 + 2 and E := +3.  (Yes, I 
skipped C :-)  Function "&" already has an established meaning in Ada, 
why not use it for a (somewhat) similar purpose?

If that looks like C, you could always use
B := Ada.Strings.Unbounded_String."&"("The Other");  or B := "&"(A);
That doesn't look anything like C.

It sounded from Randy's message, that (some of) the problems were based 
on defining a new operator ("#") and unrelated reuse of an existing 
operator ("+").  This proposal fits in with existing Ada usage.

(Funny, today I was going thru Sun's (Oracle's) Java tutorial, and 
several places they had something like "+ is used for addition, and oh 
by the way, also for string concatenation".)

-- 
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BrianG
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