Re: Ada use of parens vs brackets

Aharon Robbins wrote:


> Earlier, I asked the question of where is there chapter and verse on
> why Ada chose parens for arrays. It was indeed so that arrays and
> functions look the same. An Ada expert friend of mine (Professor
> Richard J. LeBlanc of Georgia Tech) says: ...


Notwithstanding the evidence (of the Rationale) cited, I believe (but I am
not sure) that the main reason why square brackets [] were not used to
index arrays (as they are in Pascal and C et al) was that a set of 'basic
characters' were identified (by the Ada requirements documents, culminating
in a document named Steelman), and the square brackets were not in this set.


I suspect the same reason is why round parentheses () were chosen for array
(and other) aggragates, for which square brackets are used in Pascal, and
curly braces {} in C et al.


I would guess the reason why square brackets were not in the basic set was
probably because they were not in the EBCDIC character set at the time (and
IBM mainframes were of more importance then than they are now).


--
Nick Roberts
[I don't get it. Square brackets are in the Ada character set even though
they're not used in the syntax. -John]

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