Re: Two ideas for the next Ada standard

[adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan)]

In article <dewar.841801412@schonberg> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
 
 >Laurent says
 >"   My point was that "private part = primarily an efficiency hack" is
 >technically true in Ada 83 (since we can remove it, but I'm not
 >suggesting it should have been done ;-), but false in Ada 95 where a
 >private part has an important semantic role in visibility issues."
 >
 >Now that I do not understand. The point of private parts in both Ada 83
 >and Ada 95 is to control visibility. If you remove private parts in
 >Ada 83, you lose the visibility control, the same is true in ada 95
 >(child units see the spec as well!)

I think we're getting off topic here.  When we were originally talking
about removing private parts in Ada 83, we were discussing moving the
full "private" definitions to the BODY, not leaving them visible in
the spec.  This is equivalent in terms of visibility (in Ada 83, that
is).  The "efficiency hack" referred to the problem that it's harder
to get the compiler to generate code when the full type definitions
are in the package body; presumably this is why they were moved to the
spec and put into a private part.

On an unrelated topic, I wonder whether the language designers would
have come up with a different terminology if they knew we were going
to have these discussions?  All this talk about "removing private
parts" is generating some disturbing visuals . . .

                                -- Adam