I like the cursor, because it abstracts indexes. Problem is, if I want the element, I still have to go fetch it (calling Element on the Cursor) and then I have to save it in a local variable and then I need to add a declare block for the constant standing for the result of Element and then the thing makes 5 lines instead of two and is not much more readable. Maybe I can just use Element() (especially since AdaCore seems to want to generalize dotted notation) repeatedly and have it inlined, but my past experience says 'expensive'...

And sadly Cursors haven't been generalized to all associative iterable structures in Ada (arrays for example).

Yes I was thinking of something like that. Only I wish I could also know whether I is first and/or last without calling into the iterated structure. I know this looks like corner case syntactic sugar but it comes up a lot, e.g. when serializing to JSON. I guess I should write my own iterators but I want them everywhere...