Re: maintenance of overriding subprograms

[dan@it.uq.edu.au (Dan Johnston D.B.)]

In <dewar.873939443@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>Dan says

><<To be more specific, I spelt "Initialize" as "Initialise" which is the
>correct spelling of this word in Australian English.  ( I know the Americans
>spell it with "ize", but am not sure how it is spelt by English people.)
>Anyway, this attempted overriding of the routine in Ada.Finalization resulted
>in a constraint error because of the failure to initialise the structure,
>rather than a compiler error which one would normally expect from misspelling
>an identifier.>>

>Although there is no one authority for American spelling that is definitive,
>the spelling with Z is universal in the US. In England, there is one
>authority, the OED, and as we have discussed before in this newsgroup,
>the OED ONLY permits the spelling with the Z, and does not recognize
>the spelling with an S. 

>This is the case, despite the fact that many Englishmen would swear that
>British English requires an S. Thus it is not good enough for someone
>from Australia to merely claim that this is the standard Australian
>English spelling, you need to cite some appropriate authority.

Pretty irrelevent to the newsgroup, but the Macquarie Dictionary (which I
believe to be the standard Australian dictionary ) has "initialise" 
and doesn't have "initialize".
      ("recognize" which you use above isn't in it either.)

>All of which of course is besides the original point, which is that in both
>England and Australia, and who knows where else, people do indeed spell
>it with an S, and get no initialization (or finalization) as a result,
>which can be quite a surprise.

>In fact on our list to do with GNAT is always to warn if a primitive
>operation is defined on a controlled type with the names Initialise or
>Finalise if the profile matches that of the Z-equivalents.

     Good, I hope not to be caught again, but the "ise" comes so intuitively
that it might.  (After all, I had to put  with Ada.Finalization; at the top
so was aware of the problem.)
Actually "finalize" does make it into the Macquarie dictionary (although
as a somewhat secondary entry):
  finalise ... To put in final form; conclude, settle.  Also, finalize.

  The main point is that not syntactically distinguishing between overriding
declarations and new declarations is prone to undetected errors.

     dan.                 dan@cs.uq.edu.au