Re: When is a rename not a rename?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Tuesday, January 29, 2013 4:28:29 PM UTC-8, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> What else could it mean? We don't want to be ignoring "with" clauses in one 
> rarely used case, so it has to cause a semantic dependence here.
> 
> And this doesn't have anything to do with the rename per-se; this is a 
> compilation unit like any other (that happens to be a rename), and it is the 
> compilation unit that has this effect, not the rename. I always think of all 
> compilation units as packages (imagining an invisible package wrapping 
> anything that isn't a normal package), and when you do that, this makes 
> plenty of sense.

Yes... it just requires me to change my thinking a little bit about what a "rename" means.  I thought it set up a synonym, but in the case of a library-level rename it isn't quite true; thinking about it as a wrapper makes more sense.  It's just a bit surprising, and I was curious whether this was something that was considered when the semantics were defined in Ada 95.  

And no, I wouldn't have wanted "with" clauses to be ignored, but the language could have made "with" clauses on library-level renames illegal except for "with" clauses that denoted the renamed unit or an ancestor or a unit on which the renamed unit's specification depends semantically, or something along those lines.  Not that I'm proposing any such change now.

                              -- Adam