Re: Differences between RM 5.0 and 6.0

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

Mats Weber (Mats.Weber@matrix.ch) wrote:

: I have a paper copy of version 5.0 of the Ada 95 RM. Can I use it safely
: or are there many changes from 5.0 to 6.0 (the standard) ?

The major changes from 5.0 to 6.0 were:

   1) Children of generics changed significantly -- "with"ing a child
      of a parent generic package makes a nested generic of the same name
      visible within any instance of the parent generic;

   2) The rules for static expressions were rewritten for clarity;
      the concept of "potentially static" was dropped;

   3) The accessibility rules were rewritten for clarity, using the
      hopefully more intuitive concept of accessibility "levels";

   4) Preinstantiations of the numeric text I/O packages were
      added for the predefined numeric types;

   5) Formal derived types may no longer have an explicit "known"
      discriminant_part; they may only have an unknown discriminant_part
      "(<>)" or inherit discriminants from the specified ancestor type;

   6) Incomplete types may be used as formal parameter types in the
      definition of the designated profile for an access-to-subprogram type
      (this allows a record to contain a pointer to a subprogram that
      takes that same record type as a parameter);

   7) Remote access types may now be declared in remote types packages
      (they used to only be allowed in remote call interface packages).

-Tucker Taft  stt@inmet.com