Re: Inheritance versus Generics

[mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner)]

Robert said:
    > The Ada 83 design
    > committee was well aware of the object oriented approach (many of them
    > had been using Simula-67 for over a decade -- it is well to remember
    > that the basic OO idea are ancient). Their experience said that writing
    > large scale programs using the OO approach was ineffective, and they
    > very conciously decided against incorporating such features into Ada 83,
    > deciding that the same basic functionality could be achieved in a 
    > language that concentrated on providing powerful genericty.

May I add that the same functionality would have been achieved had packages 
been either first class (makable into arrays) or second class (passable
as generic parameters) objects.