Booch Component Complexity (was: Claw & Re: ANNOUNCEMENT - GNAT 3.13p availability)

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <x7vaeed68kt.fsf@pogner.demon.co.uk>,
  Simon Wright <simon@pogner.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Ed Falis <efalis@pop.ne.mediaone.net> writes:
> > On a more serious level, I guess it raises some interesting
> > questions about the price of generality.
>
> I don't think I can properly appreciate the point you and Ted are
> making here? On the whole there is one (public) type per package, so

I don't think anyone's making a complaint exactly. Its not like the
components are more complex than they need to be. They are just not for
beginners.

For instance, I didn't have much trouble using them here at work. It
took an afternoon of spelunking to figure out what I needed to do, which
was really time well-spent because I learned a *lot* about Ada95 looking
through that code.

But I've been writing Ada code for over 10 years. Most of the rest of my
co-workers are afraid of them.

Another thing I should mention is that I've found OpenToken + Booch
Compoents to be a very powerful combination. For instance, we've got a
package that reads configuration item defintions (string or integer)
from a config file at startup, loads them into a dictionary, then passes
their valule back to clients when requested. I wrote it quite quickly in
about 130 lines of code (22 of which were "with" statements!).


--
T.E.D.

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


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