Re: Constructors/Destructors in Ada95

[Francois Godme <fgodme@bigfoot.com>]

tmoran@bix.com a �crit :

> > lack of support for Constructors/Destructors directly in the language.
>   What do you feel missing from Ada.Finalization?

No one can give me pointers to the true sources?

I did not want to start arguing over this question in a newsgroup. My
English output flow is not sufficient to sustain long debates.

To Ted Dennison, I will say that before I dared to go out on the net, I
looked at my in-house documentation. That is the one you can find with the
gnat rpms for Linux made by J�ergen Pfeiffer (arm, rationale and Ada style
guide).

This WHY question is the exception to the rule that every WHY question has
an answer in the rationale.

grep -il constructor /usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/*
/usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/rat95-p3-a.html
/usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/rat95-p3-g.html

Two non relevant answers.

$ grep -il destructor /usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/*

No answer at all.


To Marin David Condic, I will say that I went to his web site and that his
constructor does not respect the Ada style guide which states: "Avoid
declaring a constructor as a primitive abstract operation."

Constructors are a pain to inherit.

To Tom Moran, I will say that the problem in the Ada.Finalization package
is the Initialize procedure.

The procedures Adjust and Finalize do not cause any problems. But the
Initialize procedure does not respect the Ada style guide for the same
reason as above. The Initialize procedure is inherited. And worst, besides
the object itself to initialize, there are no other parameters passed to
initialize the object. It is like if in C++, all classes were forced to
have a default constructor and the instances were first initialized to
useless values.

That's why the Ada style guide goes on to state: "Consider splitting the
initialization and construction of an object."