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From: Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>
Subject: Re: 'with'ing and 'use'ing
Date: 2000/03/07
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In article <8a1egu$h91$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <8a0hio$qos$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> > It seems to me that the whole argument hinged on the
> > availability of tools to find declarations automaticly.
>
> But certainly that is a reasonable expectation in any
> decent Ada technology these days.

I'm afraid I haven't used Gnat's xref. So perhaps in a maintenance phase
of an application environemnt that uses Gnat it is. But its *not* a
reasonable expectation if:
   o  It depends on a compiler and you are in a phase where the whole
system is not yet compiling.
   o  Someone might ever need to read the source code without benifit of
the tools. (Eg: printouts, site copies, etc.)
   o  Your system is large enough that it takes more than a couple of
seconds to gather this information (DEC's SCA had this problem. I could
usually figure it out myself with SEARCH before SCA came back with the
answer).

The first is a phase that every program goes through. I would claim that
the other situations are quite common in the industry.

I would further claim that, given this fact, it is improper to choose a
naming convention for a reusable package that might be used by someone
in one of the above situations, that looks stupid with the package name
on the front when there is a convention available that will not look
stupid under either either usage.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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