What to move to?

[Ian Malone]

On 13 May 2013 11:21, Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 04/18/2013 01:08 AM, Björn Persson wrote:
>
>> Florian Weimer wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, Ada has some nice features.  At least there are real arrays, but
>>> they are somewhat cumbersome to work with, compared to Java, Python or,
>>> well, C pointers.  There are two aspects: preservation of array bounds
>>> in slices (so that you have to write Table (Table'First + Offset) to
>>> access the element Offset of Table, Offset ranging from 0 to
>>> Table'Length - 1)
>>>
>>
>> That array bounds must be preserved becomes obvious when you consider
>> arrays where the index type has a meaning beyond just position in the
>> array. If you have an array Week with a range of Monday..Sunday, and
>> you take the slice Week(Saturday..Sunday) and call it Weekend, then you
>> really don't want Weekend to suddenly have the indexes Monday and
>> Tuesday.
>>
>
> 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.
>
>
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).

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk
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