Re: Ada95 OOP Questions

["W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)" <wwgrol@PSESERV3.FW.HAC.COM>]

You also have a readability question with regard to the syntax you've
been discussing.  If  Fred is type (class) Person  and  Fido is Dog, then at
first glance what would be the "intuitive" output of the following?

   C++   -   Fred.bite(Fido)           Ada   -   Persons.Bite(Fred,Fido);

Is it  "Yelp!"  or  "You miserable mutt!"   ?    :-)
Not a very good example, but what I'm getting at is, if you're using
English words for your identifiers, then English word order can reinforce
or work against the meaning in either case.  In previous posts,

   C++      Fred.eat;                 Ada        Persons.Eat(Fred);

If these are equivalent, perhaps the Ada translation should be
                                      Persons.Eating_Should_Be(Fred);
:-)

Now set that foolishness aside.  Do you want to make your Ada look like
C++ ?  Without giving up arrays and linked lists?  Although they weren't
intended for this, protected types/objects can do it!  They can have
not only functions, but procedures and entries.

protected type Person is  -- maybe 'does' should be a synonym for 'is' :-)
  procedure Eat;
  procedure Sleep;
  procedure Work;
  -- is there more to life?
end Person;

type Crowd is array (Natural range <>) of Person;

-- I am sure the rest is obvious....

... and even Ada-83 could do it with task types, provided identifiers
    were carefully chosen.  Not that I would necessarily recommend it,
    but it may in some designs model the real world better than
    non-concurrent objects.



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W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)                                Office: 219-429-4923
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