From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,57f8540942f8e060 X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed2.dallas1.level3.net!news.level3.com!panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!nntp.TheWorld.com!not-for-mail From: Robert A Duff Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Initialization and Finalization of limited object "returned" by a function Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:15:17 -0500 Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Message-ID: References: <41b794ec-26b0-485e-a959-580a5b877a3b@f15g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <8e09c20d-172e-42a2-b2ff-994863893523@h12g2000yql.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: shell01.theworld.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: pcls4.std.com 1265987706 13747 192.74.137.71 (12 Feb 2010 15:15:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@TheWorld.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:15:06 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.3 (irix) Cancel-Lock: sha1:8ogd+RCIvQMDiSc/Emnh6r334KA= Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:9171 Date: 2010-02-12T10:15:17-05:00 List-Id: "Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)" writes: > On 12 f�v, 00:24, Robert A Duff wrote: >> Well, I don't find it "graceful" that single-element positional >> aggregates are not allowed. �And zero-element ones. �I think >> it's just bad language design. > It seems you are suggesting the ambiguity should be resolved > semantically. Why not :) No, it should be syntactic. And it should be more obvious than counting the number of expressions between "(" and ")". Aggregates should use "[" and "]", so there's no confusion. An empty aggregate would be "[ ]", and a singleton would be "[X]". As far as I know, the only reason this wasn't done was because of keyboards/character sets that didn't have those characters. But that's a bogus reason -- it could be done just like the stuff in J.2. - Bob