Re: Problem with -gnatt

["Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com>]

Matthew Heaney wrote:
> "Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@mailinator.com> wrote in message 
> news:4174BF2F.8050306@mailinator.com...
> 
>>Matthew Heaney wrote:
>>
>>>The Control_Type certainly *will* prevent such mistakes.
>>
>>I think he refers to *locking* and not *unlocking* which is, BTW, my 
>>principal objection too.
> 
> 
> We're not talking generalities here.  We're talking about a very specific 
> piece of code.  In that piece of code, you "remembered" to write the http 
> logging feature as a protected action.  If you can remember to do that, then 
> surely you can "remember" to call a semaphore! What's the difference?

I coulnd't forget to write that as a protected procedure, since the data 
reported is protected. If I must read it, I must do it inside the 
protected procedure. If I unprotect that collection and start using 
semaphores, nobody will warn me when I forget that a lock is to be 
honored. Furthermore, a second reviewer/coder could easily not notice 
that a lock is required around accesses to that data, or miss a comment 
about it.

> My advice is to stop fighting the language...

And I see your point. It's simply that I don't see the big damage in 
what I'm doing. It's an advice. My service isn't that long. The 
collection will hold at worst a hundred elements.

Maybe I'm abusing the language, but surely not fighting against it 
(IMO). It's not like I were making unchecked_conversions or taking 
'Unrestricted_references all over the place and going the C way. It's 
simply that I prefer a protected than a semaphore. Let's assume said 
report costs a whole one second worst case. The user uses it a couple 
times each hour. And let's assume there are a lot of protected, short 
procedures, that also access that collection. Clearly start using 
semaphores is going down the abstraction level path, and looking for 
problems.

The bottom line is: I'm only degrading the performance abusing the 
protected construction? Or could I get erroneous execution? If there's 
nothing suggesting the later (which I don't believe or I wouldn't be 
arguing about it), I find the cost worth it.