Re: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

["Frank J. Lhota" <NOSPAM.lhota.adarose@verizon.net>]

You've got some very good points. Slow code is inefficient only if it is
unnecessarily slow, and the Ada paradigm of using class-wide programming
only when the programmer requests it should allow the quick implicit
operations to be used in all appropriate cases. Also, I believe that there
are changes that could be made to make the Ada treatment of scalars more OO.

For starters, many of the attributes should be functions, e.g. instead of
having the Attributes

    function Integer'Pred( X : Integer ) return Integer;
    function Integer'Max( X, Y : Integer ) return Integer;
    -- etc.

I wish that we had the following functions defined in the Standard package:

    function Pred( X : Integer ) return Integer;
    function Max( X, Y : Integer ) return Integer;
    -- etc.

This would allow the programmer to re-define any of these attributes for
types derived from Integer (or other predefined types).