Re: Announce: Grace project site operational

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand either the question or the suppossed problem. 
> The only way you could possibly get different types back for a size 
> operation would be if there *were* such a generic parameter.

In one of those long philosophy threads (I think it's the strong
typing one), someone said that one of Ada's strengths is that you
can have separate types for counting separate things, so that you
cannot accidentally mix up the counts. He referred to counting
apples and counting apple cart pushers. So if this is considered
important, then the container generics ought to have a count type
parameter for counting how many members they have. Otherwise, if
they just return a generic integer, and you have an AppleCounter,
you would have to convert the result. But then you could as easily
convert the count of an AppleCartPusherList to an AppleCounter, so
you would lose that automatic safety. So I was wondering if the
GRACE lists had such a parameter.

The original poster also said that C++ programmers tend to dismiss
things like this as not useful enough to bother with, even though
they can put together classes that could simulate such separate
integer types. I'm a C++ programmer, and I agree with that, so I
thought I would just strew some more complication into the path of
the GRACE lists for the Ada programmers who do care :-)