Re: Three simple questions

[Pascal Obry <p.obry@der.edf.fr>]

Frank Christiny <fchris@pdq.net> writes:

> Friends,
> 
> Having arrived recently into the green Adian world, I am trying to
> assimilate all there is to know about this powerful, unfairly
> maligned computer language.  Most questions I have been able to
> answer from the FAQs here and there but there are three (so far) that
> have gone unanswered:
> 
> 1.  What is the correct pronunciation of Dr. Ichbiah's name?
>     Is the "ch" pronounced as in "Loch" or as in "each"?  Is the
>     final "h" is silent?

It is like in "each" and yes the "h" is silent.

> 
> 2.  What is the rationale for case-insensitivity in the language?
>     I am beginning to think it is mostly for historical reasons
>     (some machines didn't have two case letters way back then, etc.).
>     Are there any real technical reasons for why this is so even
>     after Ada95, besides preserving backwards compatibilty?

Safety and readability. Why should this_is_a_long_var be differente to
THIS_IS_A_Long_Var ? Human should not care about case-sensitive name in
a program but about the meaning of it... just my 2cents :)


> 3.  How can one block-comment in Ada?
>     It can become cumbersome sometimes, adding all those "--"s in
>     front of a large block of code one wants to "test out" on the fly.
>     Again, are there any good technical-engineering reasons why this
>     feature was left out?

Any good IDE will do that. AdaGIDE, ada-mode, Glide...

Pascal.

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