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From: Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Implicit Instantiations - was: Re: Why is Ada NOT a good choice
 for
 a beginner to programming?
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 22:04:58 -0800
Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering
Message-ID: <3E23A88A.2C0969B0@adaworks.com>
References: <mailman.1042438382.941.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32990
Date: 2003-01-14T05:55:54+00:00
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"Grein, Christoph" wrote:

> It is true, there are some places in Ada where implicit declarations or type
> conversions are done, but implicit instantiations are as yet nowhere.

Implicit type conversions, along with implicit type promotions run
counter to the Ada philosophy.

C++ does not provide the same kind of capability for declaring new
numeric types one has in Ada.   This, in spite of the entertaining
example from Mr. Rosen.

Typedef does not do the same thing.   We are still left with predefined
types.

The whole idea of Ada is to declare types so they will be checked by
the compiler and so mismatches will be caught.   If there is a problem
with that, in the current standard, it needs to be fixed, but implicit
conversions or promotions is simply a bad idea for this language.

Actually, I don't think there is really a problem here wrt Ada, even
after reading your paper.

Richard Riehle