Re: Implement Inheritance (Ada83)?

[brennan@panther.warm.inmet.com (William Brennan)]

In article <3jiala$kqs@explorer.csc.com>,
Jeff Seigle  <jseigle@csci.csc.com> wrote:
>[...]
>Years ago I wrote Fortran programs that used a quirk of the 
>language to implement encapsulation...
>The big negative is that once the code is 
>written there is no enforcement of your wonderful ideas, and the next
>one to come along with a mod can stomp down all of your imaginary fences.

And even having a design technique supported by the language is not enough.
Almost all of the packages I have written over the past 5 years use 
private types for data abstraction.  I have regularly seen occurences where
some maintainer would come by, figure he/she didn't have immediate
enough access to the type and move it into the visible part of the spec, 
breaking the encapsulation, of course.  One can hear them muttering under 
their breath: "What's this _private_ stuff for anyway, it's only getting in 
my way!"

Most of the people I work with seem to think that "encapsulation" is
a concept developed by academics for hypothetical programs.  If they know 
what it is at all.  Yikes!

-- 
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                                                     === Team-Ada member ===
Bill Brennan                                  brennan@panther.warm.inmet.com