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

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 09/02/2017 12:49 PM, Vincent DIEMUNSCH wrote:
> 
>> Oddly missing from Ada, and commented about on this list before, is why brackets [ ] aren't used for
>> array indexing.
> 
> True. This is really not understandable in 2017 ! I think it comes from the DoD's Steelman requirements to have the shortest number of ASCII characters. But that was not their best idea and Ada has now taken the opposite path in allowing Unicode identifiers..

My first language was FORTRAN, which used parentheses. My favorite language 
before I encountered Ada was Pascal, which used brackets. So before coming to 
Ada I'd used both, and didn't care which Ada used. The origin is in the DoD's 
desire to use characters common to all their systems c. 1977. The ARG are very 
big on backwards compatibility, which is another way of saying this is very 
unlikely to change.

One thing you can do with parentheses that you can't do with brackets is replace 
a mapping function with a constant array. It's possible that this also 
influenced Ichbiah's decision.

-- 
Jeff Carter
It's better to be root than to reboot.
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