Re: class wide iterable (and indexable)

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

"Olivier Henley" <olivier.henley@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:75328dc5-fc59-4228-b77e-77ba6e5101c3@googlegroups.com...
>
>> > The people doing that like a lot of about C already (why the mass 
>> > hysteria
>> > on that, I don't know. Perhaps they don't even know that you can do
>> > better?). If I personally redesigned Ada, it would be a lot like the 
>> > current
>> > Ada with some warts removed (strings and arrays in particular).
>>
>> See, that is the same mindset! (:-))
>
> What are the warts for strings and arrays?

A string is not really an array. That idea made some sense in Ada 83, when 
the only portable character set was 7-bit ASCII. But today there are many 
representations, and treating each one of them as a different unrelated type 
leads to Wide_Wide_ nonsense, and even that doesn't have a decent solution 
for UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded text.

Moreover, if you view an array as a basic building block, not something of 
interest by itself, you don't need fancy array operations that are mainly 
useful for strings (ordering operators, slices, etc.).

For Ada, of course, these things are a sunk cost, but in a new Ada-like 
language, they would be impedements to getting an implementation built. 
Moreover, in a new Ada-like language, it would make the most sense to 
completely unify containers and arrays, which would mean that arrays would 
be more like Vectors than like Ada arrays. For instance, in a Vector, the 
lower bound is fixed for all values of a particular type. That would 
eliminate a lot of programming errors that happen in Ada programs (many 
programs fail to deal with unusual lower bounds, because it's hard to get 
right).

                                                   Randy.