From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID,
	MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,b14a804025dceb20
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
From: Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>
Subject: Re: Constructors/Destructors in Ada95
Date: 2000/10/19
Message-ID: <8snnki$ll9$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 683541799
References: <39EE160D.F0A2000@bigfoot.com>
 <cJGH5.335639$i5.5078954@news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com>
 <39EF5431.BF4CD793@bigfoot.com>
X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x56.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 204.48.27.130
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
X-Article-Creation-Date: Thu Oct 19 21:04:24 2000 GMT
X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDtedennison
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; I)
Date: 2000-10-19T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <39EF5431.BF4CD793@bigfoot.com>,
  Francois Godme <fgodme@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> This WHY question is the exception to the rule that every WHY question
> has an answer in the rationale.
>
> grep -il constructor /usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/*
> /usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/rat95-p3-a.html
> /usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/rat95-p3-g.html
>
> Two non relevant answers.
>
> $ grep -il destructor /usr/share/ada/html/rat95html-1.07/*
>
> No answer at all.

There is an entire section on this topic at
http://www.adaic.org/standards/95rat/RAThtml/rat95-p2-7.html#4 . You
probably didn't find it because the proper Ada terms are "Initilization"
and "Finalization", not "Construction" and "Destruction".

However, I will admit that it doesn't say much about *why* the package
approach was chosen over other possible approaches to the same problem.
The best I see in there is:
---
A number of different approaches were considered and rejected
during the evolution of Ada 95. The final solution has the merit of
allowing user-defined assignment and also solves the problem
of returning limited types mentioned in the previous section.
---

Its possible the bit "mentioned in the previous section" will shed some
more light on the issue, but I doubt it.


--
T.E.D.

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


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.