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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Inheritance and Polymorphism in Ada !!
Date: 1999/10/25
Message-ID: <wccr9ijqr6q.fsf@world.std.com>#1/1
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Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
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Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-10-25T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> My feeling is that people do not use declare blocks NEARLY
> often enough.

I agree.

> Note that the issue of heaviness of syntax (and whether you
> need a marker between declarations and statements, which is
> the point Bob Duff has made) is quite orthogonal to the
> fundamental point that nested blocks are very valuable.

I agree that it's orthogonal.

However, I argue that the heavy syntax discourages their use.  Language
design principle:  Make it *easy* to use features that are safe, improve
readability, and all that good stuff -- don't weigh those features down
with extra rules and regulations, or extra syntax.

It's interesting to me that you like the heavy block-statement syntax,
but you gripe about the heavy procedure syntax (as compared to COBOL).
The actual syntactic overhead is the same, except for one extra blank
line in the procedure case.

- Bob