Ada '83 Rationale, Sec 16.8: Conclusion
"Rationale for the Design of the
Ada® Programming Language"
[Ada '83 Rationale, HTML Version]
CHAPTER 16: Input-Output
We have seen how the general features of Ada can be used in order to
provide flexible and convenient input-output facilities, without
adding to the syntactic framework of the language itself in any way.
The following features have been particularly useful in doing this:
- overloading of subprograms
- default parameters, including their dynamic evaluation
- limited types
- exceptions
- generic units, and especially the different formal types
- attributes of derived types
This chapter has provided an excellent demonstration of the capability
of Ada as an application language. It illustrates that once a language
has an adequate richness of mechanisms it passes some kind of
threshold, and then effectively becomes self-extending and able to
lend itself to varied domains of application, including such demanding
areas as input-output. Ada is the first real language to have achieved
this.
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