Re: Tools

["James S. Rogers" <JimMaureenRogers@worldnet.att.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> I don't think this can possibly be true. Dynamic dispatching is semantically
> equiavlent to a series of calls protected by conditoinals, and it would seem
> that any methodology which could not handle:
> 
>    if a then call-b
>    elsif b then call-c
>    ...
> 
> is too limited to be useful.

Yes, dynamic dispatching is sematically equivalent to a series of calls protected
by conditionals, or even a case statement.  A set of conditionals or a case
statement is easily evaluated on the fly.  The required information is directly
available for static analysis.

Tagged types differ. They require a static analysis tool to build and maintain
a dispatch table for all types, keeping in mind scope and visibility rules for
each calling point.  Given that the current package may be influenced by a 
child package which is unreferenced in the current package, this appears to be a 
task which would not be reliably executed by a tool which was less than a full
Ada compiler front end.

Jim Rogers
--------------------------------------------
Team Ada