Re: Don't use the "use" clause

[Anonymous Coward <anonymous@coward.org>]

In article <Ij4Bf.1960$2O6.514@newssvr12.news.prodigy.com>, 
<adaworks@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> Someone, I forget who, once said that "People who make up strict
> rules for programmers tend to be people who no longer write
> production programs - or never did."  While this probably does not
> apply to you, it does seem to fit a lot of people who invent coding
> standards.

I find that the strictest of coding standards is a great benefit to
the largest and least disciplined developement teams.  Excessive use
of the use clause (along with other sloppy programming practices like
excessive global variables) calls for restraints.  Your typical
variety of C programmers who learned the Ada syntax on the job and are
drawn to a Windows environment is the stereotype that comes to mind.
The shortcoming of strict rules is negligable compared to mess that it
prevents in this situation.

OTOH, disciplined, experienced Ada developers who don't abuse the
unruly and lenient constructs (use clause, gotos) can be more
productive without the restrictions.

The latter is a rare case.  I'm currently working in an environment
that has no restrictions, and most of the staff is quite disciplined
and knowledgable.  However there are a couple exceptions.  I have been
forced to write subprograms to export private types of some of my
packages as a public types, because the user of my package (who is new
to Ada) just wants a plain float, or an integer.