Re: += in ada

From: Vinzent 'Gadget' Hoefler (ada.rocks_at_jlfencey.com)
Date: 10/15/03 

Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 20:06:39 +0200

Hyman Rosen wrote:

>Vinzent 'Gadget' Hoefler wrote:
>> So, what's your point? ;-) That it is not "built-in"?
>
>My point is that "augmented assignment" is a very old
>feature of programming languages.

And my point is that Ada already has it.

It just calls it "procedure". :)

>In fact, it's a basic
>feature of computers, since most of them have machine
>instructions which add one thing to another.

You heard about "abstraction"? Ada is a high level *language*, not a
high level assembler.

The idea was to let the programmer say what it wants and let the
compiler figure out how to map that onto the target hardware, not the
C-way: figuring out how to express what we want in such a way that
most machines might understand it. Ada is even better: It still left
the option open to get down to the bare metal of the machine if this
is needed. Target hardware (do you remember the PDP-7? - I don't.)
becomes obsolete some times. :)

<flame target="interested audience" level="explicit">

Why doesn't know C *** about interrupts? Or port I/O? Or ring buffer
data structures? So basic features of some CPUs... oh well, perhaps
not at the time they designed C, I know. Bad luck if you want to do
that. But hey, it must be fucking cool, you still have
<voice mode="pissed off">'augmented assignment'</voice>.

Oh well, that's surely a pretty nifty feature you really need, just
because you can save so much time when typing it (and IMVHO: *that* is
the only true and valid argument).

</flame>

And BTW, it's a funny thing that the compiler might compile

|a += 2;

to

| movl a,%eax
| addl $2,%eax
| movl %eax,a

instead of

| addl $2,a

, isn't it? ;-P

Vinzent. 

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