One of the key areas identified by the WG9 guidance document [1] as needing attention was improving the ability to write and enforce contracts. These were discussed in detail in the previous chapter.

When defining the new aspects for preconditions, postconditions, type invariants and subtype predicates it became clear that without more flexible forms of expressions, many functions would need to be introduced because in all cases the aspect was given by an expression.

However, declaring a function and thus giving the detail of the condition, invariant or predicate in the function body makes the detail of the contract rather remote for the human reader. Information hiding is usually a good thing but in this case, it just introduces obscurity.

Four forms are introduced, namely, if expressions, case expressions, quantified expressions and expression functions. Together they give Ada some of the flexible feel of a functional language.

In addition, membership tests are generalized to allow greater flexibility which is particularly useful for subtype predicates.

The following Ada issues cover the key changes and are described in detail in this chapter:

These changes can be grouped as follows.

First there are conditional expressions which come in two forms, if expressions and case expressions, which have a number of features in common (147, 188).

Then there is the introduction of quantified expressions which use for all to describe a universal quantifier and for some to describe an existential quantifier. Note that some is a new reserved word (176).

Next comes the fourth new form of expression which is the expression function (177).

Finally, membership tests are generalized (158) and there is a minor change regarding qualified expressions (3).

© 2011, 2012, 2013 John Barnes Informatics.

Sponsored in part by: