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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Is this expected behavior or not
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:33:41 +0200
Organization: cbb software GmbH
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Date: 2013-04-11T09:33:41+02:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:15:14 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> You seem to want to completely dump the Ada design in favor of something 
> based on multi-methods.

Nope, I want to reaffirm Ada design in more fundamental terms. I don't want
to change the semantics which is OK to me.

> Multi-methods are the same as weak typing to me, I 
> don't want to see them explicitly or implicitly.

Exactly the opposite. Multi-methods is a strongly typed description of what
the language does anyway. The alternative is overloading proven to work
extremely poor.

The point is that the class [e.g. of string types] is there. You can handle
it ad-hoc using overloading [Ada 95 solution, which is called ad-hoc
polymorphism] Or you can articulate the class explicitly. You do it in your
proposal anyway as Root_String_Type.

In that case there is simply no alternative to multi-methods because n-ary
operations do not have preferable argument. So what are you going to do
with this? You ditch operations, literals, slices. A great theory! 

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de