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From: J Kimball <spam@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 23:43:00 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:19187
Date: 2014-04-07T23:43:00-05:00
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On 04/07/2014 07:47 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "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.
>
>

Maybe they could agree on a new unused operator being added. Of course mathematics uses every known graphic in some area. We might be able to agree that an addition should be in the ASCII code points for Unicode which leaves a couple of things that stand out that aren't already in use in Ada. "~" seems like a good character with a derivative meaning "approximates" which often all a conversion can do.

UBString := ~String; -- Would drive people from some linguisitic backgrounds crazy, though.