Re: Idiom for a class and an object in Ada

["Matthew Heaney" <mheaney@on2.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message 
news:Oc8dd.2347$ta5.1598@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> So you would do something that looked like this:
>
> package AD_Converter_Class_And_Objects is
>
>     type AD_Converter is tagged private ;
>
>     procedure Some_Op (AD : in out AD_Converter) ;
>
>     AD_Number_1 : AD_Converter ;
>
> private
>     --stuff
> end AD_Converter_Class_And_Objects ;


Well, obviously this won't work, since you can't declare object AD_Number_1 
prior to declaration of the full view of private type AD_Converter.

And why did you name the package "...Class_And_Objects".  Don't you mean 
"...Type_And_Objects"?  This is very, very confusing!


> Similarly if I had a half-dozen of these puppies? If I had only one, you'd 
> want to hide it in the package body and make the package be an object 
> instead of a class?

What do you mean "instead of a class"?  Do you mean "type" or "class"?  If 
you mean "type", then why don't you say that?



> Would there be a reason to prefer making a child package to contain one or 
> more objects of the class? Or a separate child package for each object?

Do you mean one or more "objects of the type"?  Why are you saying "class" 
here?  This is very, very confusing!


> There could be plusses and minuses to any given approach. I'm mostly 
> wondering what most Ada programmers prefer or tend to use.

I showed you how to do this in another post.  Declare the type as limited an 
indefinite, and provide functions that return a references to the 
statically-declared objects.  Just like Text_IO.