[GAP] Question about subprogram syntax

[Peter C. Chapin]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006, Diego Alonso Cáceres wrote:

> I've been teaching Ada for three years now and often my students make me 
> the same question: "Why don't parameter-less subprograms have empty 
> brackets like C or Java? The code would be easier to read and maintain. 
> It would be also possible to have a variable and a procedure with the 
> same name."
>
> I really don't what to answer because I think the same. Wasn't Ada 
> thought as "write once, read many times" or "Ada enhances readability"? 
> Why inherit this from Pascal?

I'm not an expert but my understanding was that this is considered a 
feature. The idea is that it is possible to replace a constant with a 
parameterless function without editing any code that uses that constant.

 	A := B;

B might be a value today, but a parameterless function tomorrow. This 
might be useful, for example, when it becomes necessary to do some 
significant computation to obtain the desired value.

I don't know how often this actually comes up in the wild, though.

Peter