Re: Q: on redefinition of "=

[dgibson@thalamus.cis.ohio-state.edu (david scott gibson)]

I wrote:
>> "Anyway, in the design I'm currently working with all types must
>> support automatic initialization and finalization (and thus are
>> controlled types)"

Robert Dewar wrote:
> This sounds truly awful. I wonder if whoever devised this approach has
> any idea how much overhead this approach introduces, not to mention
> complexity in the generated code.

As I mentioned in my post, I'm painfully aware of the negative
implications of this strategy.  Unfortunately there is a mismatch
between Ada and the language I'm trying to map to Ada.  When I import
some type as a generic parameter, I need to know that the instance
gets a valid representation of that type.  With Ada's scalars, this is
impossible.

>Mostly Ada is a low level language in the sense that what you write is
>pretty closely tied to the semantics of the machine, so you have soe
>reasonable idea of the underlying execution semantics.

While I certaily see how this is useful for performance critial
applications, I'm not convinced that this is a particularly good
characteristic for a "software engineering" language.  Ada supports
abstraction nicely in many ways.  The notion that a programmer needs
to be thinking in terms of how language constructs are implemented
seems less than ideal.

--
Dave
dgibson@cis.ohio-state.edu