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: 103376,db88d0444fafe8eb X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsread.com!news-xfer.newsread.com!newspeer.monmouth.com!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!nntp.TheWorld.com!not-for-mail From: Robert A Duff Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Surprise in array concatenation Date: 07 Sep 2005 16:01:12 -0400 Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Message-ID: References: <1125544603.561847.32140@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <14muavojz308w.1ouv7xin79rqu$.dlg@40tude.net> <87fyspgqrm.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> 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 1126123272 12686 192.74.137.71 (7 Sep 2005 20:01:12 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@TheWorld.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 20:01:12 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4508 Date: 2005-09-07T16:01:12-04:00 List-Id: writes: > "Jean-Pierre Rosen" wrote in message > news:j50hfd.l2a.ln@hunter.axlog.fr... > > Robert A Duff a �crit : > > > Why would you want an unconstrained array indexed by enumeration type? > > > And why would you want an empty array if the array type is constrained? > > > > > I do that all the time, especially in ASIS programming. You may have > > arrays indexed with subranges of declaration_kinds for example. > > > I recall a project where an Ada newbie, having learned about enumerated > types, created one enumerated type that was three pages long. That is, > the number of values in the type was so great that it took three pages > of 11 X 14 standard printer paper to contain it. > > This was a situtation where a good idea was carried to an absurd extreme. What do you think of Ada 200X's type Wide_Wide_Character, which is an enumeration type with upwards of a billion literals? ;-) If you actually wrote down the declaration in full, and printed it out, it would be a stack of paper about 500 feet tall! > Perhaps if enumerated types were extensible, something I suggested > during the Ada 95 process, they would be more acceptable in OOP. > However, I was persuaded that the complexity of Ada, should that > be done, would be so much greater that the idea was a bad one. I think the idea of extensible enums is a good one. But it's tricky to get the rules just right. One would want to retain the huge benefit of Ada's full-coverage rules for case statements and aggregates. - Bob