Re: New Software Forum

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org> writes:

> On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 18:41:43 +0200, Ingo Marks wrote:
> > Ingo Marks wrote:
> > 
> > or even this way :-)
> >  
> > Put_Line ("Iteration" & Num &
> >           " Result:"  & Result &
> >           " Time:"    & Elapsed_Time);
> 
> Well now we are borderlining the poor readability. In the previous
> version I could at least know that Elapsed_Time was a Duration here it
> can be anything. This is one of the great features of Ada that it is so
> self-documenting.

It has _never_ been a feature of Ada that the type of an object was
obvious at the point of the use of the object. Consider:

A := B + C;

Is A an Integer, Cartestian Vector, or directed graph? You have no
idea. However, any reasonable Ada IDE will provide a way to popup the
definition of A, so you can see the type.

In fact, the fact that there is no type information cluttering the
statement is a feature. Compare it to the use of "Hungarian notation"
in some Windows code.


My only problem with Ingo's suggestion is that it is a pain to provide
the "appropriate string package", that defines all of the necessary
variations of "&". That's why I wrote Auto_Text_IO
(http://users.erols.com/leakstan/Stephe/Ada/auto_text_io.html); it
writes a similar package for me.

-- 
-- Stephe