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From: dmitry@elros.cbb-automation.de (Dmitry Kazakov)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Static typing (Was Re: Better support for garbage collection)
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 09:16:45 GMT
Message-ID: <3ac446f0.1707484@news.cis.dfn.de>
References: 
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Date: 2001-03-30T09:16:45+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001 23:46:04 GMT, Robert A Duff
<bobduff@world.std.com> wrote:

>"Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> writes:
>
>> "Robert A Duff" <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote in message
>> news:wccvgotscxo.fsf@world.std.com...

>By the way, the "ulterior motive" in my ideas about literals is that
>what I *really* want is user-defined literals.  I think the programmer
>should be able to say "this type here has literals", and define which
>forms are legal for that type, and what they mean.  But in order to
>avoid chaos, we can't have the form of the literal affecting overload
>resolution.

I strongly support your intention (user-defined literals and surely
user-defined aggregates), but I believe that the way is wrong. I would
say that a literal always has a type. And its type should be
determinable from the literal's form. I like the idea that, 1 is a
UNIVERSAL_INTEGER, 1.0 is a UNIVERSAL_FLOAT, 'a' is a
UNIVERSAL_CHARACTER etc. Then if I want to have 1 acceptable as a
value for MY_OWN_INTEGER, or for MY_OWN_FLOAT, or even for
MY_OWN_FILE_DESCRIPTOR, I (or the language, if the type is derived
etc) should simply provide a conversion from UNIVERSAL_INTEGER to my
type. Here you are.  IMO the actual problem is not inventing some
complex overloading rules, but supporting type conversions.

(For purists: there are type conversions in Ada, for instance there is
one from a derived type to its base)

Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov