Re: Elaboration order

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <dewar.827846300@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>pragma Preelaborate is an important feature of Ada 95, one that everyone
>should be throughly familiar with.

Yes, and pragma Pure is useful, too.

Unfortunately, I've had a great deal of trouble using Preelaborate and
Pure, because I always find myself wanting to put in some debugging
print-outs, and saying "with" of an I/O package poisons everything so I
can't use Preelab or Pure.  And there's no telling when you're going to
need a debugging print out.  And it's kind of a pain if you have to
*remove* a pragma Preelaborate during the process of finding one bug,
because that modification might introduce *another* bug, causing
confusion.

Gdb is not quite up to the point where I can use it all the time instead
of debugging print-outs.  (Of course, reading one's code is usually a
better way of tracking down bugs, but not always.)

- Bob