4 ms·

I almost burned all my Ada books, my Ada-u-akbar t-shirt, my 'in strong typing we trust' Lady Lovelace medallion, when 'they' added the 'in out' access mode to

• Jtsummers 6y ago
  For others, here's [0] the Ada rationale writeup on this. I suppose because I've been trying to learn SPARK more than Ada proper, this hasn't bitten me. Since SPARK's version of functions are closer to pure functions. But reading the rationale, I sort of get why they did it. Functions were already impure, but couldn't be marked as explicitly changing their inputs (access types could be altered and you'd never know by the function signature), so changing it to allow explicit `in out` parameters made some sense (as the Ada language has a preference for more explicit rather than implicit behavior). Though that kind of defeats my case since I used Ada as an example, and its functions may as well be procedures. [0] https://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/05rat/html/Rat-9-3-9.html https://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/05rat/...
  • touisteur 6y ago
    There's pragma pure and I sure would like it to be enforced and to allow lazy execution sometimes. As for pointer types being undetectable on call sites I agree that it is annoying, but they could be hidden behind a private or limited private type so I'm not sure there's an easy way out. But I still feel this change was a lazy way to make some border cases 'nicer to look at' or 'easier to code' but not easier to read... But don't take my word for it, I hate the dot notation with burning hatred... So...