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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: About String
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:19:11 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2008-06-08T17:19:11-04:00
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Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> writes:

> You did not state it explicitly, but I presume that you allow mixing
> declarations with executable code ("as in Java and other languages")?

Yes, if I ran the circus, I would allow that.  I really find it annoying
that I have to add 3 useless lines of code (declare/begin/end) and an
extra level of indentation, when all I wanted to do was declare
a very-local object.

I also find it annoying that I can't add a statement at the beginning of
a procedure, without moving everything into a local block.  E.g. I have:

    procedure P (X : Integer) is
        Local : constant String := ...;
    begin
        ...

and I want add:

    if X = 0 then
        raise Blah;
    end if;

and I want that to come first.

> After all, with the possibility to initialize the new variable with
> arbitrarily complex expression (including function call), this is
> already the case and the whole declare-begin-end block is just
> reflecting some artificial separation.

I agree.  I suppose it comes from Pascal, where declarations and
executable code are completely separated.  It makes no sense in
Ada, where declarations are just as executable as statements.

- Bob