<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On 13 May 2013 11:21, Florian Weimer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fweimer@redhat.com" target="_blank">fweimer@redhat.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">On 04/18/2013 01:08 AM, Björn Persson wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Florian Weimer wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Yes, Ada has some nice features. At least there are real arrays, but<br>
they are somewhat cumbersome to work with, compared to Java, Python or,<br>
well, C pointers. There are two aspects: preservation of array bounds<br>
in slices (so that you have to write Table (Table'First + Offset) to<br>
access the element Offset of Table, Offset ranging from 0 to<br>
Table'Length - 1)<br>
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That array bounds must be preserved becomes obvious when you consider<br>
arrays where the index type has a meaning beyond just position in the<br>
array. If you have an array Week with a range of Monday..Sunday, and<br>
you take the slice Week(Saturday..Sunday) and call it Weekend, then you<br>
really don't want Weekend to suddenly have the indexes Monday and<br>
Tuesday.<br>
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Weekdays are a very bad example because it is locale-dependent whether Monday < Sunday or the other way round. So you really can't fit them well into an enumeration type, and Java 8 orders the enumeration values alphabetically by their name, to make that point perfectly clear.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I suppose a week actually looks like a ring buffer rather than a linear array. Week(Saturday..Sunday) would make sense in that context, but it'd take someone more familiar with esoteric languages than me to say whether there's any language that provides that (not a feature much in demand I'd think).<br>
</div></div><br>-- <br>imalone<br><a href="http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk" target="_blank">http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk</a>
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