From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5992229ab824d8f7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dgibson@thalamus.cis.ohio-state.edu (david scott gibson) Subject: Re: Q: on redefinition of "= Date: 1996/04/02 Message-ID: <4jrlluINN15b@thalamus.cis.ohio-state.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 145448547 references: <4jkj5sINN8d3@aleutian.cis.ohio-state.edu> <3160C33B.1FE2@mcs.com> organization: The Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-04-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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