Get rid of bit and bit[] ?

[Niko Korhonen]

John Stoneham wrote:
> This is one thing I really like about Ada. The compiler will just not 
> let you do ANYTHING with a type that requires any kind of implied cast. 
> Boolean is Boolean and nothing else. If you've got a Boolean variable, 
> you can't add an integer to it, you can't assigned anything other than 
> another Boolean to it, and you can't use anything other than a Boolean 
> in it's place.

That's indeed how a type safe language should behave. Fine examples are 
statically typed functional languages Haskell and O'Caml, which are 
*absolutely* type-safe. That is, they have very clear and strict type 
rules with no casts. In Haskell converting a truth value to integer is 
done via the obvious approach:

b = true
i = if b then 1 else 0

Also you can just forget about accidentally mixing signed and unsigned 
values :) This hasn't really bothered me at all while programming in 
Haskell or O'Caml. I would gladly exchange "easy boolean to integer 
conversion" you people seem to appreciate so much for type safety.

-- 
Niko Korhonen
SW Developer