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Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 18:24:22 +0200
From: "G.B." <rm-dash-bau-haus@dash.futureapps.de>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: why Ada type casting is different from other languages?
 newType(value)
 vs. (newType)value
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Date: 2014-07-14T18:24:21+02:00
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On 14.07.14 17:25, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> I don't like the (type)expression syntax because I can never remember what the precedence is.  This is especially a problem for (type)object.method(args), because I have to look up whether the type conversion applies to just the object or to the result of the function call.
>
> In general, questions such as this are meaningless, because for the most part they come down someone's style preference.

It appears that in some situations style alone is not a permissible
language design guide. WRT syntax, McIver and Conway explain, with
novice programmers in mind, that there needs to be a good signal
to noise ratio and that this may mean just enough syntax, but also
enough syntax.  In particular, they address "homonyms",
as in "type(expression)" vs "something-else(expression)".

"Alternatively, it may be better to increase the complex-
  ity of the syntax in order to reduce homonyms which blur
  the signal. For example, the meaning of the various compo-
  nents of the Turing expression^7:


    f(C(p).A(I))(N)

"might be better conveyed with the syntax:

    f(C::p->A_{I})[N]

"The second form, whilst regrettably no more mnemonic than
  the first, does at least provide adequate visual differen-
  tiation between pointer dereference, array indexing, func-
  tion call, and substring extraction.

^7:
"Create a substring consisting of the Nth letter of
  the string returned by the function f when passed
  the Ith element of the array member A of the object
  within collection C which is pointed to by p".

Linda McIver & Damian Conway,
Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design