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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Does Ada need elemental functions to make it suitable for
 scientific work?
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:56:20 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2012-07-19T20:56:20-05:00
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"Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org> wrote in message 
news:jtgs6g$833$1@speranza.aioe.org...
...
> Just like when I read a paper, I first look for the definitions
> of symbols and terms used by the author. one does not have to
> guess. Everything is defined. To do these in Ada, Ada will
> define them as it wishes. As long as there are there, and
> well defined, no one will complain. All of these issue have
> been solved in many other languages.

We try very hard in Ada not to define things that will be confusing to 
casual readers. If you have to look up the definition of how something works 
in Ada, we've pretty much failed that.

For instance, there has been a long controversy about using unary "+" as a 
short-hand conversion operator. That was it's original intent, but efforts 
to add such operators to packages like Ada.Strings.Unbounded have failed 
mainly because some people think that the usage
     Unb_String := +"string";
would be confusing to casual Ada users. (It's common in my code, but I have 
to define the "+" myself.)

So it's not at all clear that the sort of operators you are suggesting are a 
good idea.

                                                 Randy.