Version 1.1 of acs/ac-00227.txt

From: Martin Dowie
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011  2:23 PM

I've been writing up the GoF Patterns in Ada2012 (13 of 23 done so far!) and
have noticed a number of times when I've found myself writing extended return
statements that do nothing:

   function Create return Application is
   begin
      return Result : Application do
         null;
      end return;
   end Create;

It's only a bit of "syntactic sugar" but I think it would be nice to allow:

   function Create return Application is
   begin
      return Result : Application is null;
   end Create;

And/or to allow a function expression to be used, e.g.:

   function Create return Application is
      (null);

which would implicitly expand into the original.

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From: Randy Brukardt
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011  2:27 PM

Umm, you do know that the entire "do" part is optional, right? (Note the square
brackets around that part in the syntax of 6.5(2.1/2)).

What's wrong with:

function Create return Application is
   begin
      return Result : Application;
   end Create;

which is perfectly legal today??

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From: Gary Dismukes
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011  4:16 PM

...
> It's only a bit of "syntactic sugar" but I think it would be nice to
> allow:
>
>    function Create return Application is
>    begin
>       return Result : Application is null;
>    end Create;

There already is a shorthand (even shorter than your suggestion:-):

   function Create return Application is
   begin
      return Result : Application;
   end Create;

> And/or to allow a function expression to be used, e.g.:
>
>    function Create return Application is
>       (null);
>
> which would implicitly expand into the original.

Ada 2012 expression functions couldn't really be used that way, because that
form already has a meaning, which is to return the value null (requires an
access type result, of course).

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From: Martin Dowie
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011  4:40 PM

Thanks Gary, I'd never see this before!

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From: Martin Dowie
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011  4:51 PM

Sorry Randy, I hadn't picked up on that at all...in the 6 years it seems to have
been available!

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From: Randy Brukardt
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011  8:43 PM

Well, I have to admit that this has to be in the top 5 of "easy to provide
feature requests". :-) The only question was whether I missed some subtlety in
your request -- I guess not.

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From: Bob Duff
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2011  10:09 AM

> There already is a shorthand (even shorter than your suggestion:-):
>
>    function Create return Application is
>    begin
>       return Result : Application;
>    end Create;

Right.

Another thing that might work, depending on what Application looks like is:

    return (others => <>);

or:

    return Application'(others => <>);

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