Quarterly News Digest

摘要

As I write these lines I have the FOSDEM livestream on my second monitor. This brings me to the first topic that I want to highlight in this issue: sadly, during last quarter we knew [1] of the passing of fellow Adaist Vinzent "Jellix" Hoefler. I "devirtualized" him precisely at FOSDEM'20, where he cracked a joke during my demo that was producing lots of "No C sources found in this project" warnings. To this, he had to say (filtered by my memory): "I don't see the problem."As for regular discussions, this time around I selected a few interesting and sometimes amusing heated debates. We have a couple of technical rabbit holes, about the finer details of protected actions syntax (that started from an innocent-looking question about logging [2]) and properties of real-time clocks and durations [3]. Did you know that Duration'Range can legally be as short as a day? I am a bit ashamed to admit I did not. Also, an often-seen observation about array indexing syntax from an Ada newcomer led to many strongly-held opinions on the merits (or lack thereof) of some aspects of Ada syntax [4] that led us as far as when Ada prototypes had parentheses for subprograms without arguments.