Basic issue with dotted notation and tagged types

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

I can't remember if this was already discussed here, somewhere in a  
rationale or an RM comment, here is something I really don't like, with a  
field (or member) of a tagged type and a function, both of the same name;  
a very basic case:


     with Ada.Text_IO;

     procedure Test2 is

        package IO renames Ada.Text_IO;

        -- type T is tagged;
        -- function F (E : T'Class) return Character;

        type T
           is tagged record
              F : Character := 'A';
           end record;

        function F
          (E : T'Class)
           return Character
           is ('B');

        E : T;
        C : Character := E.F; -- The function or the field?
     begin
        IO.Put (C);
     end;


Will this display `A` or `B`? Actually, the program compiled with GNAT  
4.6, displays `A`. It displays the same even when the two commented lines  
are commented‑out and thus the function `F` is declared before the field  
`F`. I can't remember if the RM have special wordings about it, but I feel  
this does not honour the principle of least surprise. May be this should  
be disallowed, to access any one of the two, when both are together  
visible from a scope?


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University