Re: Tell whether a primitive subprogram was overridden

[Adam Beneschan <adambeneschan@gmail.com>]

On Monday, August 18, 2014 4:41:24 PM UTC-7, Victor Porton wrote:
> Is it possible to determine whether for a given object of type T'Class a 
> primitive subprogram F was overridden (not the same as for type T)?
> 
> I would like this check for efficiency reasons, not to pass it to a callback 
> if the default "null" operation was not overridden.

No, Ada doesn't provide a mechanism for this.  I don't know of a language that does, although in some languages you might be able to use "reflection" to squeeze the information out, but with some difficulty.

The best solution that I can think of is to add a function to T:

    function F_Does_Something_Useful (Obj : T) return boolean;

This would be False for T, but for any derived type where you override F, you'd also override this function to make it return True.  

                            -- Adam