Re: Silliness (was: Looking for good Ada95 book)

[cm@mihalis.demon.co.uk (Chris Morgan)]

In article <55mcmd$63c@krusty.irvine.com> adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan) writes:

   On the other hand, Ada programmers tend to end all their statements
   with semicolons, which means they aren't really statements at all,
   since a semicolon implies that there's a second half of the sentence
   coming up; but that never seems to happen in Ada.  You can read a
   whole program and keep seeing semicolons, which means there's more to
   come, but then you hit the last semicolon and there's nothing more
   after it and you end up wondering, did the programmer intend to say
   something more and just forget?  So you're just left there hanging.
   Oh, well.  I suppose there are worse things; after all, ending a
   sentence with a semicolon isn't half as wishy-washy as ending one with
   an ellipsis . . .


But you are forgetting about the requirement to link the program. Various
units can be linked as the main program, and indeed multiple units can be
visible to the compiler each of which could be linked. Whilst there is some
uncertainty, they all naturally break off mid-sentence in case they are
merely library units to be linked with some other main unit.

So, you do a link and tell it to use, say, my_main_proc as the main
unit. The never-ending sentence you mention is terminated by this
nomination, so conceptually the linker puts a full stop (period for
Americans) in place of the last semicolon of this unit and then completes
the link with a nice well-formed program sentence.

Chris
-- 
Chris Morgan                   
http://www.mihalis.demon.co.uk/