Re: body stub not allowed in inner scope

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 4:23:32 PM UTC-7, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Mehdi Saada" wrote in message 
> news:15c49c4e-726a-4fd7-bf35-c7d27ff9a491...
> > Thanks.
> > But that's ugly... How about fixing this for the next norm ?
> 
> Does anyone other than ACATS tests actually use stubs these days? Why?

I do, sometimes.
Usually to put a particularly knotty or verbose chunk of code. For example, in an interpreter I was writing I put all the operators, which 'explodes' (m*n; m = #types, n = #operators) based on the number of internal types, in their own package and made the body separate.

I've also used it with parsing & stream-I/O functions:
Function Parse( Text : String ) return Program;
Function Parse( Text : String ) return Program is Separate;

Procedure Read(
        Stream : not null access Ada.Streams.Root_Stream_Type'Class;
        Item   : out  T) is Separate;

> (We used to use them extensively, but only because Janus/Ada on 16-bit MS-DOS 
> limited a single unit to 64K of generated code -- and our editors couldn't 
> handle more than 256K of source code at a time. None of that makes sense 
> today.)

This is true; but it does make sense for organizing and isolating portions of the codebase even further w/o having to muck up the library-hierarchy... and might be required at a certain level (eg primitive ops).