Re: Syntax for tagged record types

[Dale Stanbrough <dale@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>]

Robert Dewar writes:

"Most people find the use of discriminants as "constructor arguments" a
 natural and powerful feature in Ada (though naturally they don't think
 in terms of this terminology).
 
 You can declare that "I think X is a kludge" for any X, but such a statement
 is only helpful to discussion if you give some idea *why* you think this."


We had this argument a few years back now, and I think it was David Emery 
who posted about opening a file...

	type File_Type(Filename : String) is private;
	

Here you have to supply a filename if you want to open a file - but once
you have opened it, you don't necessarily want the filename any more.

Similarly you may want to initialize an index into a hash table, which
again requires a horrible long string, which is of no relavence once
the index value is calculated.

Dale