Re: Ada 9X _has_ "class"

[magnus@lglsun.epfl.ch (Magnus Kempe)]

jgg@evb.com (John Goodsen) quotes a lot and writes:
: 
: The 'CLASS attribute is not what you will see in marketing literature.
: What you will see in Marketing literature is "tagged types".

I have seen a lot of marketing literature touting "inheritance" and
"polymorphism", although the programming languages involved did not have
such keywords.  In addition, I have never seen any ad revolving around
"int" for C, "VAR" for Pascal, or "!" for PROLOG.

If you have a specific, reasoned proposal for a valid syntax change in
Ada 9X, by all means write it.  But please, don't resort to fallacious
arguments.  Marketing droids should know better than throwing keywords
around in order to promote Ada (and any other programming language),
shouldn't they?

The primary goal w.r.t. Ada's syntax is to have a readable and
understandable language.  It has been explained several times that Ada
9X provides both specific types and classes (a set of related types).
These constructs are _so_ different that they should each be subsumed
by a specific concept, and these concepts should not be randomly
mixed.

Since a specific type is _not_ a class, it is quite reasonable to _not_
call it a "class".  If you think the distinction does not matter, or is
"merely technical", think twice.  A tagged type T is _not_ a class: it
is _in_ a class (T'class) as well as in the superclasses of T'class
(e.g. T_First'class).

-- 
Magnus Kempe                "No nation was ever drunk when wine was cheap."
magnus@lglsun.epfl.ch                                   -- Thomas Jefferson