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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: constant string array
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 02:53:13 GMT
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In article <W5gZ5.6439$bw.518837@news.flash.net>,
  "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote:
> "Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> news:912ut9$fga$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
>
> : You can get some feeling for this by supposing that someone
> : looking at the above code decides to replace
> :
> :    A : boolean;
> :
> : by
> :
> :    type motor_status is (on, off);
> :    a : motor_status;
> :
> : with a revision history saying
> :
> :    use ON/OFF for motor status instead of True/False, makes
> :    code clearer.
> :
> : Now the spelled out version is easily fixed, the compact
> : one line "trick" version no longer works.
>
> Of course, if the underlying representation is important (0
for False, 1 for
> True), you may have broken some other things as well...


Well such a dependence not properly documented is a pretty
ugly thing. After all your paragraph above assumes you
are using nasty low level stuff, and such low level stuff
should be well documented and well isolated :-)


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