Re: Q: on redefinition of "=

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

david scott gibson (dgibson@aleutian.cis.ohio-state.edu) wrote:

: Hi.  I'm overloading the = operation to return a non-boolean value for
: a non-limited private type.  Is there any way in Ada95 to "hide" the
: automatically defined = returning a boolean value?  Redefining =
: returning a boolean type in the private section didn't seem to help.

Presuming your private type is not a tagged type, you could
override the predefined "=" operator with one declared as "abstract."
For tagged types, this is only allowed if the type is itself abstract.
But for untagged types, you can use "abstract" as a way of overriding
a primitive operation in a way that makes it illegal to call it.

On the other hand, it might be simpler to provide some definition 
for "=" that returns Boolean, perhaps in terms of the one that 
returns the non-boolean value (are you using tri-state logic?).

: Dave
: --
: dgibson@cis.ohio-state.edu

-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
Intermetrics, Inc.  Cambridge, MA  USA