Re: Package with initialization only

[dkristol@see-my.sig (David Kristola)]

"Samuel T. Harris" <sam_harris@hso.link.com> () writes:
>Ted Dennison wrote:
>> 
>> In article <37961DD6.E56BD3E9@maths.unine.ch>,
>>   Gautier <gautier.demontmollin@maths.unine.ch> wrote:
>> > A small "aesthetic" problem: I have a package with initialization
>> only;
>> > thus I must add a dummy procedure to resolve the with/without body
>> > ambiguity Ada95 doesn't accept. There is surely a more elegant
>> formulation,
>> 
>> Well, perhaps it would be more pleasing if you renamed your dummy
>> routine "Initialize" and moved all the initialization code into it. If
>> you put it into the public part that would even allow others to
>> reinitialize the variable.
>> 
>
>While I don't disagree with Ted's suggestion,
>I do want to point out that many times the
>"intialization" must be done only once, preferably
>during elaboration. In such cases, I call the
>procedure "elaborate" and call it in the package body.
>I feel the name elaborate conveys the restriction
>of single initialization

Maybe it is my real-time embedded systems background,
but i much prefer explicit initialization over
elaboration.  The example that immediately comes to
mind is a case where the elaboration code wrote over
a memory mapped bus and sometimes caused contention
interrupts.  There was a handler to deal with the
situation, but it was not installed yet.
Installation of interrupt handlers was the first
thing the main program did after elaboration.


--djk, keeper of arcane lore & trivial fluff
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