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From: mjsilva@jps.net (Mike Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada The Best Language?
Date: 18 Jul 2001 18:03:03 -0700
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Very True!  If you use Ada you *will* get spoiled by attributes!

Mike

"Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<3B5573DA.5ABA8EA7@earthlink.net>...
> Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> > 
> > Original Message From taw@users.sourceforge.net
> > 
> > 
> > >- too strong typing
> > 
> > What? Sorry, but the typing is a great plus. It's true, you have to think a
> > little more about it when designing types and sometimes this might be a
> > little
> > bit annoying ;), but is thinking really that *bad*?
> > 
> > If nothing helps, there's still the feature of Unchecked Type Conversions.
> > At least you were warned then. :)
> 
> My nomination for "Best Kept Secret of Ada" is strong typing.  It's
> almost always viewed as purely a defensive feature--to help avoid type
> mismatches, and so you have to really think through your types, which
> can take time, and sometimes be a pain, yadda yadda...
> 
> Strong typing lets you _embed_information_ into your program, and then
> get it out again via attributes.
> 
> Consider this:
> 
>    type Altitude is range 0 .. 50_000;
>    Above_Ground : Altitude;
> 
> The "defensive" interpretation says that you can now be assured an
> attempt to assign a negative altitude or go into military airspace will
> be immediately caught.
> 
> But look at what you get from the "informational" interpretation:
>   'First, 'Last, 'Size, 'Range, 'Address, 'Min, 'Max, 'Image, 'Val,
> 'Pos, 'Value, 'Input, 'Output, 'Read, 'Write, 'Pred, 'Succ, 'Valid,
> 'Wide_Image, 'Wide_Value, 'Wide_Width, 'Width.
> 
> And that's just from a simple little scalar type definition.  Floating
> and fixed point types, composite constructs, tasks, and so on, each have
> their own specific means of embedding and extracting information.
> 
> Ada's strong typing produces "information dense" code.  Simple
> declarations, like that of Altitude above, inherently provide
> information that would otherwise have to be explicitly maintained or
> derived when using other languages.
> 
> Marc A. Criley
> Senior Staff Engineer
> Quadrus Corporation
> www.quadruscorp.com