Re: Suffix _T for types found good

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Aug 20, 8:38 am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:25:12 -0700 (PDT), Adam Beneschan wrote:
> > Yeah, earlier on in this thread I was thinking about whether it would
> > have been possible for Ada to have separate namespaces for types and
> > other non-type entities without ambiguities.  Attributes make this
> > impossible.
>
> Nope. In all cases the type and variable names can be overloaded. Any
> difference between them is not lexical.

Apparently I didn't make myself clear, since we seem to be talking
about two totally different things.  Either that, or I just don't
understand what you're saying.

Let me try to make myself clearer: If there were a rule change in Ada
so that types (or subtypes) could have the same identifiers as other
entities in the same scope, in many or most cases the compiler could
unambiguously determine from context whether the identifier refers to
the type:

   XYZ : Some_Type;
   type XYZ is array (1..10) of Some_Other_Type;
   An_Object : XYZ;

In this last line, it's clear that only the type declaration could be
meant by XYZ.  But in attribute cases, it can be ambiguous: XYZ'First,
XYZ'Last, XYZ'Size, probably some others.  So that aspect of the
language would need a new design.  I'm not sure whether there are
other cases, besides attributes, where the identifier would be
ambiguous.

                                -- Adam