Re: Container reqs

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9qctpn$lil$1@news.huji.ac.il>, Ehud Lamm says...
>
>Let's try to make a list of req the Ada community in general can agree on,
>and than see which of the existing libraries is closest and concentrate on
>that.

This sounds a whole lot like the initial charter of the HOLWG. I'm beginning to
be amused at how this is taking on the charactaristics of the early phases of
the history of Ada itself.

>(the following are some suggestions)
(ones I agree with totally left out)

>* It seems there is a general agreement  to distinguish bouned from
>unbounded versions. This can be attributed to a more general
>(non-functional) req: the library should be applicable for RT

I agree, but I'd take it a bit further. The "unbounded" containers should try to
not perform heap operations outside of adding/removing items. That would allow
their use in real-time apps that perform all initializations at startup time.
Any operations that potentially affect the heap should be commented as such.

>* Since I am thinking about using the library in education, I'd prefer to
>make isntantaion as easy as possible (possibly, by supplying
>pre-instantiated versiosn). I also prefer to hide the tagged nature of
>interface relationships from casual and first time users.

I would not be in favor of "dumbing down" the library so that beginners can pick
it up quickly. Making it easy to use properly should be a goal, but not the
primary overriding one (as it is with any facility). If it ends up being a
hierarchy of generics, that's fine. But in that case there should ideally be
some default instantiations (or default generic parameters), to take some of the
work out of it. I realise that an educator's view of this situation is going to
be directly reversed from mine, but there it is. Perhaps we can find something
that works for both goals.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

No trees were killed in the sending of this message. 
However a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.