Re: Syntax question

[ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen)]

In article <D5D3t9.7nL@thomsoft.com>, kst@thomsoft.com (Keith Thompson) writes: 

|> Some versions of preliminary Ada (1979, possibly 1980) used ":=", "=:",
|> and ":=:" for named associations for in, out, and in out parameters,
|> respectively.  This was changed to "=>" for all three modes.  As others
|> have mentioned, this applies only to named notation; in positional
|> notation you just write the actual expressions or names separated
|> by commas.

It was in Preliminary Ada (1979) and gone by 1980.  I believe the
rationale for removing it was "syntactic uniformity".  Too bad:  When I
first saw the Preliminary Ada RM, this innovation really excited me.
Anyone who's spent time reading and trying to understand someone else's
code knows how important it is to understand which actual parameters are
set by a call, and which are expected to have been set beforehand.

--
Norman H. Cohen    ncohen@watson.ibm.com