From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!.POSTED.3d73Ybk3C5U4I2t8lv+lAQ.user.gioia.aioe.org!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Latest suggestion for 202x Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2019 11:00:37 +0200 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: <728c4668-8fa0-4a57-a502-2bf476fc3940@googlegroups.com> <4908c3e3-18dc-4953-bf26-46f160d2ebfd@googlegroups.com> <9dcf22a2-2255-4089-b1f0-93e31448415e@googlegroups.com> <86h88obeu0.fsf@gaheris.avalon.lan> <39e749cd-de5c-44fa-b8ec-50d36f3bd52c@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 3d73Ybk3C5U4I2t8lv+lAQ.user.gioia.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.7.2 Content-Language: en-US X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.9.2 Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:56710 Date: 2019-06-22T11:00:37+02:00 List-Id: On 2019-06-22 10:43, Randy Brukardt wrote: > "Dmitry A. Kazakov" wrote in message > news:qekjbb$vu0$1@gioia.aioe.org... > ... >>> Why *should* array >>> indexing and function calls be treated as the same thing? >> >> Because they model the same thing, a mapping, when arrays come in >> consideration. > > Arrays only exist because they mapped easily to early hardware. In a modern, > container-based system, there is no reason for them to exist separately -- > they are just a kind of container. Perhaps the compiler would map them to a > hardware array specially, but that simply doesn't matter. Another cases are having control over memory management and marshaling/serialization, when keeping object in a single contiguous location is important. > Specifically, I'd suggest that "array" is a container very similar to > "vector" (esp. the bounded flavor). It should have roughly the same > operations, just no expandability. > > That would require separating strings and arrays, but that would clearly be > a good thing -- a string needs to support multiple representations while > that's rarely needed for arrays. Just let strings have two container interfaces at once. Here is a case where different brackets could be useful. E.g. S(I) could give a code point/character, S[J] could give an encoding unit, e.g. octet for UTF-8 string or word for UCS-2. However overloading of () should work no problem, IMO. -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de