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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: New aggregates with Ada 2022.
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2022 20:24:32 -0500
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:t91buq$10im$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 2022-06-23 03:06, Randy Brukardt wrote:
...
>> (How something gets implemented should not be part of a language
>> design, so long as the design does not prevent an efficient 
>> implementation.)
>> I certainly would not treat them as special in any way, just a series of
>> function calls. (Possibly records could be treated that way as well,
>> although it is less clear that an efficient implementation is possible 
>> for
>> them.)
>
> Syntax sugar for subprogram calls is not enough because it does not allow 
> generic programming. One should be able to write a program that deals with 
> any instance of the interface. Like a generic body working with any actual 
> array or a class-wide body which unfortunately is impossible to have for 
> arrays presently.

You're thinking too small. Obviously, in a language without an syntactic 
array construct, every data structure would be some sort of record. So 
class-wide operations would be available for all of those -- and without all 
of the complications of a separate formal array type. The idea is to have 
one mechanism for pretty much everything, and let the compiler sort out the 
results. Back when we created Janus/Ada, that wasn't really practical 
because of memory and CPU speed constraints, but none of that holds true 
anymore. Simplify the language, complicate the compiler!

                                           Randy.