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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 19:47:46 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2014-04-07T19:47:46-05:00
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"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com> wrote in message 
news:1893909476418340554.191505laguest-archeia.com@nntp.aioe.org...
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
>> Very early in the design of Ada, there was a proposal to add a unary
>> operator symbol specifically for the purpose converting between types.
>> Ichbiah and his team rejected the proposal as "+" already exists and has 
>> no
>> other useful purpose. They said that "+" should be used for this purpose.
>
> I don't get the idea of using plus as a conversion operator, I'd this so e
> mathematical notation I've not come across?

The second part above is so garbled that I can't guess how to respond to it. 
The first part is easy, one camp says unary "+" doesn't have a (useful) 
mathematical meaning, so let's ignore that meaning and use the operator for 
conversions. The other camp says that unary "+" has a (useless) mathematical 
meaning that should be left alone. Because of the dynamics of the Ada 
standards process, neither camp ever gets to lead and the net effect is that 
we never get *any* conversion operator. Which we've needed from day 1, IMHO.

                  Randy.