Re: What would you like in Ada202X?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:50:07 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> I tried to suggest making objects overloadable as a mitigation to the 
> maintenance problems (I don't think we can ever do better than that; at some 
> point it has to be the case that entities that are too similar are not 
> considered "unrelated"). But that of course added a whole 'nother level of 
> complexity to the proposal, and of course it doesn't do anything for types 
> and packages.

BTW, if procedures become 1st class, then they will be objects, and you
will have to overload them anyway.

>> Probably something really revolutionary is needed here, something like
>> introduction of T'Class was, which resolved all OO mess just per finger
>> snap.
> 
> Not that revolutionary, not for Ada -- overload everything.

OK, but there must be a way to ensure that each non-anonymous entity would
have at least one unique name valid for all contexts were it is accessible.
It is already a problem.

> Most languages 
> can only overload on parameters, which is way insufficient (objects usually 
> don't have parameters, and having all objects the same fixes nothing), but 
> of course Ada can. The problem is mostly one of compatibility;

More overloading cannot make legal programs illegal.

> secondarily, 
> I don't see a good way to have overloaded types (exceptions aren't a 
> problem; they're just objects of a built-in type; not sure about packages - 
> package types would do the trick, but seem way over the top).

Because type is not an object. It is already kind of overloaded with the
type conversion function of its own, e.g. T as a type and T(X) as
conversion function.

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