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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: _Type vs no _Type
Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:24:37 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com> writes:

> On Nov 5, 4:52�pm, Robert A Duff <bobd...@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote:
>> Named notation never, ever, ever makes sense for operators.
>> And if the body of "+" is short, single-letter
>> names are crystal clear.
>
> Well, except in the case where you need to specify an operator that
> might not be immediately visible.

IMHO, you should never, ever, ever be in that situation.

The whole point of operator symbols is that you don't
want a nice long meaningful name, you want a short
symbol, and all readers of the code must memorize
what it means.  (For "+" they probably memorized
it in grade school, except the part about overflow.)

Writing Foo."+"(Left => ..., Right => ...) or
Foo."+"(..., ...) completely defeats the purpose.
You should instead say "use" or "use type".
Or if you really want the package name, then
you shouldn't have made it an operator symbol
in the first place.

If I were in charge, operators would always be directly
visible.  It's really silly that ":=" is always visible,
but "=" is not.  This idea was proposed for Ada 9X,
but it was rejected because it is (slightly)
incompatible.  That's when "use type" was invented
as a workaround.

- Bob