Re: An improved Ada?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Wojtek Narczynski" <wojtek@power.com.pl> wrote in message
news:pan.2004.09.28.20.41.14.508631@power.com.pl...
> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 16:40:40 -0400, Matthew Heaney wrote:
>
> > This is largely the reason why we made the AI-302 container types
publicly
> > tagged.
>
> In that case, let me ask. If they are publicly tagged now, how about
> interfaces as of AI-00251 on them?

We didn't do that, because they would have to be declared inside the generic
units and be specific to the element type. That would make them pretty much
useless; you can get the same functionality by deriving from the container
type, and it would be much easier to write as well (you wouldn't have to
define dozens of wrappers).

For interfaces to really work, the element type would have to be an
interface. But that would be too weird for most users (requiring the
understanding of a new feature before being able to use containers), would
have suboptimal performance (because of all of the dispatching for trivial
operations) and it wouldn't work well for making containers of existing
types (especially elementary types).

                                      Randy.