Re: Learning Ada (newbie)

["Martin Dowie" <martin.dowie@nospam.baesystems.com>]

what happened to point 5) - the anonymous point! :-)

Mark Lundquist <mark@rational.com> wrote in message
news:z75z6.679803$U46.21074483@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com...
>
> Ayende Rahien <Dont@spam.me> wrote in message
> news:9af9ao$6ee$1@taliesin.netcom.net.uk...
>
>
> 4) Safe pointers.
>
> 6) A crisp model for inheritance and dynamic polymorphism that is *not*
> based on the idea of a "class".  IMHO, class-oriented languages
> (Simula/Smalltalk/C++/Java etc.) embody an intellectual error in their
> treatment of encapsulation (privacy and primitive operations, a.k.a.
> methods), by making the the "class", which is really a type definition,
also
> the unit of modularity.  The conflation of "module" and "type" in the
notion
> of "class" results in all kinds of distortions: special syntax and sematic
> complexities for various types of constructors (constructors as a
> language-level concept do not exist in Ada, since they are unnecessary
> without classes), the need for a "singleton" idiom, and the need for
> "friend" classes.
>
>    Also, Ada's dispatching model is nice and clean.  Inheritance does not
> imply dispatching, and dispatching is a property of the method invocation,
> not just the method declaration.  And you can dispatch on the return type
of
> a function, not just parameter types.
>