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From: Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Latest suggestion for 202x
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2019 14:38:42 -0700
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Date: 2019-06-17T14:38:42-07:00
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> On 2019-06-17 15:35, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
[...]
>> Yet, it's convenient to claim that Ada is consistent and readable,
>> because it has round brackets for array indexing?
>
> Right, A(I,J) is far more readable than A[I][J].

That conflates two separate issues.  In C (and many C-like
languages), 2-dimensional arrays are simply arrays of arrays, which
is why the syntax for accessing an element is A[I][J].  In Pascal,
for example, 2-dimensional arrays are distinct from arrays of arrays,
and an element of a 2D array can be accessed as A[I,J].

I don't see A(I,J) as being more readable than A[I,J].

Personally, I've always thought that Ada should have used square
brackets for array indexing.  I seem to recall that part of the
rationale was that Ada might be used with character sets that
don't include the '[' and ']' characters, including some variants
of EBCDIC.  But it's not that big a deal, and it's too late
to change it.  Introducing A[I] and removing the existing A(I)
notation would break existing code, which would be unacceptable,
and allowing both would be worse than allowing just one or the other.

I'm not at all persuaded by the argument that array indexing is
interchangeable with function calls.

    A(I) = 42;

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst-u@mib.org  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
Will write code for food.
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */