Re: Why is it Called a Package?

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>]

Nick Roberts <nickroberts@callnetuk.com> writes:

> One answer might be: because a word had to be chosen. Now (if you really
> want to ruffle some feathers ;-)

I'm not sure why this stuff should ruffle feathers,
but you might be right.  ;-)  Certainly trivial issues
cause the most discussion, perhaps because everybody can understand
the issues.

>... ask why 'all' was chosen as the word to
> signify dereferencing (hardly intuitive), why 'others' was chosen as the
> the word to signify a default value for choices (not very intuitive
> when, as is quite commonly done, it is the only choice), or why, for
> that matter, any language uses the words and/or terms 'loop' and
> 'iteration', when the words 'repeat' and 'repetition' would be easier
> and more obvious (and 'do' must be the least intuitive of all).

FWIW, I don't like ".all" -- I prefer Pascal's "^".  If it weren't such
a big ugly thing, it wouldn't need to be optional -- I like being
explicit about pointer dereferencing, because it has important
semantics, but I never write ".all" except in the few cases where it's
required, and then grudgingly.  "Others" seems fine to me, although I
must admit that when I first learned Ada in 1980 or so, I was confused
by the others-only case -- I remember asking an expert if something like
"(others => 'x')" was legal.  I prefer Pascal's "while ... do" to Ada's
"while ... loop", although I wouldn't like "do ... end do;".  I would
prefer "while ... do ... end while;" and "loop ... end loop;".  Also
"for ... do ... end for;".  Pascal has "repeat ... until".

> Of course, for all those poor souls whose native language is not
> English, but who must program (Ada and other languages) in English,

... such as Jean Ichbiah himself!  ;-) ...

> perhaps you'd better not ask about words being 'intuitive' after all.
> Imagine it! Ouch. They have my sympathy.

Yes, I imagine that's painful.  There was a discussion on comp.lang.misc
a couple of months ago, where somebody was trying to design a language
that had no keywords -- the point being to avoid the problem of
non-English speakers being confused by English words.  Even the playing
field.  Everything was done with squiggly-looking punctuation
characters.  To me, it looked like C, only less readable.  The language
designer was not a native English speaker (although his posts were in
English, and were perfectly understandable to me).

- Bob