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

[dennison@telepath.com]

In article <7bcp7l$1qr@drn.newsguy.com>,
  nabbasi@pacbell.net.NOSPAM wrote:

> If I am writing a package now, what can I do to make sure its name in unique?

Well, communicating with the other developers on your program would be a good
start. :-)

On STGT, where we had over a hundred developers, each CSCI (subsystem) in the
system had its own designator which had to go on the front of the package
name. That reduced the problem to simply communicating with the other
developers in your CSCI.

This particular case is a bit worse than that, though. Aside from the naming
problem, it seems the packages were created to serve the same purpose. Having
a subsystem devoted to reusable and reused code helps a lot with this type of
problem. It is quite likely that both groups would have realized that "Stack"
is something that belongs in the reusable subsystem. Not only would that have
prevented the namespace clash, but it also would have prevented the customer
from paying to have essentially the same package developed twice!

> Actually this can be really a problem, becuase If I build
> program, depending on which package of that name it finds 'first', in
> its search path, it will use.  So by changing the -I order for gnatmake,
> one could end up using the other package than the first without
> knowing it. (offcourse the change of having 2 packages with same name and
> exactly same interface is low, but it can happen).

I haven't tried this error with Gnat, but with other compilers this situation
got clearly flagged as an error ("can't have two units w/ same name in same
compilation", or somesuch).

T.E.D.

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