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From: leake@cme.nbs.gov (Stephe Leake)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: limited private types
Message-ID: <771@marvin.cme.nbs.gov>
Date: 7 Dec 88 15:51:46 GMT
References: <8197@nsc.nsc.com>
Organization: National Institute of Standards & Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
In-reply-to: rfg@nsc.nsc.com's message of 1 Dec 88 23:06:03 GMT
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <8197@nsc.nsc.com> rfg@nsc.nsc.com (Ron Guilmette) writes:

   What I was proposing was the suspension of the "scalar-by-value-result"
   rule, and a substitution (in LRM 6.2{6,7,8}) of language which would
   instead insist that *all* parameters, regardless of type, be passed
   by reference.

   This would yield two benefits:

   1)  We could put our (corresponding) full type declarations for our
       limited types into packages bodies where they seem to belong (and
       where they require fewer re-compilations when changed) and

   2)  we could make the language simpler by having one single (standard?)
       type of parameter passing *semantics* for *all* types of objects.

This sounds reasonable, but will obviously have a performance impact
where lots of scalar parameter passing is going on (something I don't
do much - records are much more expressive than scalars). But since
the problem is really only with (limited) private types, how about
insisting only those must be passed by reference?

Stephe Leake 	(301) 975-3431 		leake@cme.nbs.gov
National Institute of Standards and Technology
(formerly National Bureau of Standards)
Rm. B-124, Bldg. 220
Gaithersburg, MD  20899