Re: with'ing a "foreign" package or subsystem

[dennison@telepath.com]

In article <m3g17qcc3u.fsf@mheaney.ni.net>,
  Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org> wrote:
> Suppose my company and another company are collaborating on building a
> large software system written in Ada.  We each go off and separately
> build the subsystems we're responsible for, and then come together some
> time later for system integration.
>
> During development, I needed a stack, and I implemented the following
> package:
>
> generic
>   type Item_Type is private;
> package Stacks is ...;
>
> and my company has been using it for a while.
>
> But come integration time, the other company (call them ACME) had also
> written package Stacks, but with a different interface, and they're
> using their version of Stacks everywhere.
>
> Can both packages coexist in the same application?  Is there a way to
> give a package a "virtual" subsystem, to prevent name-space conflicts
> like this?  Something like:
>

For some reason, the above reminds me very strongly of the intro to "The Odd
Couple". :-)


> package ACME.Stacks renames <ACME company's "Stacks">;
>
> I seem to recall reading something like this in the Ada95 Rationale, but
> don't know if any vendor has actually provided such a mechanism.

The only options I can see are to either rename one (or both) packages and
all references to them, or to rename *every* package to be a child of the
"company" package like you suggest above. Personally, I'd go for the first
(or try to unify them).

But I'm sure you knew about both of those options.

T.E.D.

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