Re: What evil would happen?

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

"Wojtek Narczynski" <wojtek@power.com.pl> wrote in message
news:5ad0dd8a.0307150019.5370f3a3@posting.google.com...
> Randy,
>
> > P.S. Do we have to discuss this AGAIN?
>
> Sorry, my knowledge of what has been discussed, when, and how many
> times, is fairly limited.
>
> But AI-323 only discusses functions. It doesn't discuss return <X>
> statement for procedures.

I've never heard of any real support for that. Functions in Ada have
side-effects and that is not going to change (else virtually all existing
Ada code would cease to work). There is no point in having value-returning
procedures which are identical to functions with side-effects -- that's just
an extra complication.

In any case, this is a political issue, not a technical one, and it is very
unlikely that a consensus for any change will ever occur. Of course that's
stupid, but politics is generally stupid (look at the majority of our
elected officials).

I've toyed with adding a mode to Janus/Ada to allow in out parameters on
functions, but I haven't seen a compelling use for it (the most valuable
uses would be in Claw, but that has to work with standard Ada).

                             Randy.