Re: array of operations

[Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen <oleh@vlinux.voxelvision.no>]

"Ehud Lamm" <mslamm@huji.ac.il> writes:

> "Mark Biggar" <mark.a.biggar@attbi.com> wrote in message
> news:3D7E0EB1.2070708@attbi.com...
> > marco wrote:
> > > Do you know if there is some way of bulding up arrays of functions
> and/or
> > > procedures?...
> >
> > Sure, Ada allows for access types to functions and procedures so you
> > construct an array of those.
> 
> Notice that all the procedures must have the same parameter profile. There
> are cases where this isn't what you want.
> There are also nesting issues (you can't have a top level array linking to
> nested subroutines) [Note to language lawyers: The last sentence was not
> meant to be a formal definition...]
> 
> So in many cases you may decide (after thinking about "access procedure" and
> "access function") to use a dispatching routine that is invoked with an
> "opcode" (operation code) and calls the appropriate routine.
> 
> Ehud

Or a pointer to an object and let the dispatching mechanism implement
the function pointer behind the scenes.