Re: Community Input for the Maintenance and Revision of the Ada Programming Language

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Lucretia" <laguest9000@googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:4527d955-a6fe-4782-beea-e59c3bb69f21@googlegroups.com...
On Thursday, 10 August 2017 06:41:56 UTC+1, G.B.  wrote:
> On 09.08.17 23:08, Luke A. Guest wrote:
...
>> > 5) Lambdas for the people looking for new (i.e. Old) trendy features.
>>
>> Would you want lambdas that can be returned, or assigned? Or just
>> lambdas that are unnamed expression_function-s of Ada 2012?
>
>This is for the language designers to determine.

Well, we've discussed this, and we seem to be split about 50-50. (or maybe 
it is more like 30-40-30 where one of the numbers is forget the lambdas). At 
least some of the people think that adding simple lambdas would be bad 
enough advertising for Ada that we'd be better off not doing it at all in 
that case.

Another group is rather opposed to doing a complex version because it is 
likely to add erroneousness to the language, or essentially force Ada 
implementations to switch to spaggetti stacks and require some form of 
garbage collection. (Some people think that a set of rules could be defined 
to make it safe, but I personally think they're daft -- there are so many 
special cases that there would be a boatload of rules, and there would be a 
lot of risk of missing something important. I suppose I've given away which 
group I'm in. :-)

>I know people want this, because I've seen this in this newsgroup.

I'd recommend letting those people advocate for themselves, 'cause we need 
to know what their needs are -- we can then see how those fit into the 
various proposals as they continue to be developed. I don't want to guess (I 
don't see any need for lambdas or generators -- they both seem like features 
de-jure to me -- and yes, I know they've both been around a long time).

One of the main reasons for focusing on problems rather than solutions is to 
get some guidance on the answers to questions like this. "I need lambdas" 
tells us nothing about how or why someone wants to use the feature. 
Describing a problem and a possible solution using lambdas (or whatever 
feature) is more enlightening.

                                            Randy.