Re: Re: Style: always declare subrountines?

[John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>]

Richard Riehle wrote:
> My own own preference for internal subprograms that have no
> entry in the specification  to promote them to a private package
> specification.   This promotes reuse, enhances maintenance, and
> allows extensibility.   For example, consider: [...snip...]

One thing that always bugs me is that private packages can only be
accessed from the body of a public package. What would be nice to
be able to do sometimes is:

  with P.Implementation;
  package P.Public is
    type T is private;
    ...
  private
    type T is
      record
        X : P.Implementation.Stuff;
      end record;
  end P.Public;

Unfortunately P.Implementation can't be a private package here. (I
seem to remember someone saying that there was an AI that addressed
this problem; can anyone point me at it if this is true?)

Another gripe: it would sometimes be nice to be able to say "type T
renames P.Implementation.Stuff", but the standard trick of using a
subtype to rename doesn't work because T is declared as a type, not
a subtype. Grrr!

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