At 05:38 PM 11/15/98 +0100, Christoph & Ursula Grein wrote:
>Why should all languages use similar syntaxes?

     Exactly.  There are, on the other hand, reasons for languages to have
different syntaxes.  In this particular case, the advantages of the
selected syntax in the context of Ada were felt to outweigh the
"disadvantage" of not having a class keyword.   When Jean Ichbiah proposed
an alternative that did use the class keyword, these advantages were not
yet known.  It is possible that someone could come up with a notation with
classes that allowed the same degree of expressiveness as the current
grammar, but I doubt it.  For example, the current notation allows for
untagged views of tagged types, as well as private tagged types:

     type Foo is tagged private;

    versus:

     type Foo is private;
     ...
   private
     type Foo is tagged...

                                        Robert I. Eachus

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