Re: The best thing/greatest feature summary

["Tom Hargraves" <tharg@vtcinet.com>]

Good point James.
All these ease-of-programming features come at a cost.

But what is the cost here? A few strings can hardly be much of a cost
nowadays. I'm not asking for a 1Mbyte dynamic .GIF icon to popup, just a
routine name...

These 256 byte strings could live quite happily in the corner of the xMbyte
proms and nobody would even know they where there ;-)

(OK, so I'm setting myself up here. There's bound to be a space shuttle
designer out there who knows the weight of a byte of memory and how much it
costs to put it in orbit...)

Regards,
Tom H.

"James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:39FF1DBD.74184FDC@worldnet.att.net...
>
>
> Tom Hargraves wrote:
> >
> > Let
> >  X := Ada
> >  Y := Java
> >
> > then the wish is
> >
> > to add java.lang.reflect 'style' routines to the ada language
> >
> > Here's a simple example where I'd find it useful:
> >
> > Quite often in user written Ada error handling packages, it is nice to
be
> > able to increase the detail in the error message, and be able to print
or
> > log the name of the routine or class in which it occured. A 'debug' mode
so
> > to speak.
> >
> > In ada I've seen this done by declaring constant strings which match (at
the
> > time of writing) the text to be displayed or logged. However there is
> > nothing to link the content of these strings to the items they refer, so
> > during the life of an application mismatches can occur.
> >
> > java.lang.reflect has getName, getDeclaringClass, to name but two.
> >
>
> The java.lang.reflect 'style' of routines rely on the fact that Java
> creates
> a "Class" object for each class defined in a program. This "Class"
> object
> contains the name of the class, the name of the Super for the class, and
> several other pieces of information. I, for one, do not want this extra
> overhead
> in realtime programs. Realtime systems are frequently constrained by
> memory as well as by timing. The extra overhead of such shadow data
> structures
> is easily overlooked by developers. In realtime systems the consequences
> of
> such errors can be disasterous.
>
> If an Ada developer wants such a capability, then all you need is a
> simple
> generic package with parameters for all the items you want to identify.
>
> Each package can instantiate the generic with appropriate parameter
> values.
> The generic package would declare the "getName", "getDeclaringClass",
> and
> other java-like subprograms as needed.
>
> Jim Rogers
> Colorado Springs, Colorado