Re: Ada syntax questions

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:rrv0u2$102i$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 2020-12-23 02:23, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
>> news:rrs92d$1pfi$1@gioia.aioe.org...
>> ...
>>> But you cannot rid of X(...) syntax, where X is an object.
>>
>> That's a prefixed view, of course. No one would want to get rid of that.
>
> Hmm, where is the operation? A prefixed view is
>
>    <expression>.<operation>(...)
>
> Indexing is
>
>    <expression>(...)

I neglected to mention that what Ada calls objects are also function calls 
in this proposed generalization. (Much like enumeration literals are in 
Ada.) So for static semantics (that is, compile-time), pretty much 
everything is a function call. This gets rid of the anomalies associated 
with constants (which don't overload and thus hide more than a parameterless 
function - which is otherwise the same thing); combined with 
variable-returning functions, everything is overloadable and treated the 
same in expressions. Almost no special cases (operators still require some 
special casing, but we can make them always visible which would eliminate 
more issues).

Clearly a compiler for this language (which can't be Ada, unfortunately, way 
too incompatible) would special-case some kinds of built-in functions for 
things like objects and indexing. But that doesn't need to hair up the 
semantic model, just the implementations.

...
>> Ada (and most other languages) are full of redundant stuff. Simpilfy the
>> basics and then one has more room for interesting stuff (static analysis,
>> parallel execution, etc.).
>
> Yes, but I would rather keep all this stuff in the language making it 
> overridable primitive operations.

Yeah, you don't plan to formally describe nor implement this language, so 
you don't really care about how complex it gets. :-) Well, at least not 
until performance suffers. Ada is reaching the limit of what can be done 
without substantial incompatibility. If we're going to allow that, we need 
to start with a cleaner base, and part of that is getting rid of 
redundancies.

                                  Randy.