Re: An observation of Ada (may offend)

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

R.A.L Williams (bill@valiant.gmrc.gecm.com) wrote:

: h. And a special one for Ada95: poor encapsulation of objects. I can
: define a 'member function' for a class by including the class in the
: parameter list. Unlike C++ or Eiffel, I can do this *anywhere* in my code,
: even a nested function hidden somewhere seemingly 'irrelevant'. Whereas
: other features of Ada go out of their way to force the programmer to
: follow 'good practice' (sometimes a matter of opinion), this seems
: very lax.

What are called "methods" in some OOPs are called "primitive 
operations" or "dispatching operations" in Ada 95.  These 
may be defined *only* immediately within the same package
spec as the type.  (If a type extension is declared in a package body or
declarative part, you can override inherited primtive ops there -- and
only there -- for that typ extension, but you can't define any new ones.)

So I don't think Ada 95 suffers from the above problem.  Perhaps
you were referring to something else, but I can't quite imagine what
problem it would be.  An example might help.  We certainly never meant
for Ada 95 to be "lax" ;-).

: Bill Williams
: bill.williams@gec-mrc.co.uk

-Tucker Taft  stt@inmet.com
Intermetrics, Inc.