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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Subject: Re: Elimination of "use" clauses
Date: 1999/07/09
Message-ID: <7m3jfk$sud$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1
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Date: 1999-07-09T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <3784DC54.6463EDCA@decada.zko.dec.com>,
  "Michael F. Yoder" <yoder@decada.zko.dec.com> wrote:
>  It requires no
> conscious thought or finger movement to realize that
> 'Unb.Insert' comes
> from the unbounded strings package.


Or perhaps unbounded trees, or perhaps the
Universal_National_Boundaries package?

I personally dislike these kind of package abbreviations. They
are fine for people who know the code well, but they probably
know where stuff is anyway.

Otherwise you constantly have to be searching back to find out
what peculiar abbreviations have been used.

A good rule, one that is required in many Ada coding standards,
is no abbreviations. I see no reason why this rule should not
apply to renamings of packages, but in my experience, people are
so desparate to have very short names when they have to type
them all over the place, that they choose very short cryptic
abbreviations (I consider incidentally that Unb for
Ada.Strings.Unbounded is in that category).

This is a matter of taste of course, and there are many styles,
but this is the one I like least. I would prefer to see honest
full qualification, rather than cryptic abbreviations.

And as for USE TYPE, anyone who thinks it is acceptable to say

  X := Special_Operation_Types."+"(A,B);

does not have my sympath, and replacing this with

  X := SOT."+"(A,B);

is not helpful.

Yes, of course you can use renamings, but what possible value
is this. If you see:

  X := A + B;

then it is *definitely* useful to be able to click on the "+"
to quickly check if this plus is other than a standard one
(perhaps a really nice tool would paint such operators in a
different color). But looking at a bunch of renaming operations
for "+" at the front of the package and then trying to figure
out if one of them applies, given the types of A and B is no
fun.


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