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Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 13:59:38 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..
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Date: 2003-01-16T13:59:38-05:00
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Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> This mechanism and generics are both designed *just* for variation.

The dispatching mechanism is designed for runtime variation.
The generic mechanism is designed for compile-time variation.
Just because you can occasionally track types well enough
through dispatching code so that dispatches can be replaced
with explicit calls doesn't change that.

> I see no advantages in this case.

The advantage is that more efficient (smaller/faster) code
can be generated from generics, if not in theory then certainly
in practice. Programming languages are not just abstract
constructs, they are means for generating sequences of native
machine code to perform some task.

> It is same as to claim that (generic)
 > is better than (discriminated type)

Yes, and that's a valid claim. Given a fixed size, it's likely
that better code can be generated than when the size must be
passed around as a variable.

 > What's the use of a variation over a type set if you are unable
 > to specify an element of the set?

The use is to specify an operation on elements of the set a
single time, and yet have that operation work for many elements.