Re: Conversion of Access Types Question

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

Matthew Heaney (matthew_heaney@acm.org) wrote:

: ...
: And for what benefit was the distinction between general and
: pool-specific access types made?   ...

For what (little ;-) it's worth, the optimizer can do a better
job if you stick with pool-specific access types, because
fewer things are "killed" when you store through a pool-specific
access value.

As far as history, I certainly wouldn't "blame" Bob for this one.
There was an almost fanatic attention to upward compatibility
during the Ada 9X process, and that attention certainly paid
off in compatibility.  The downside is that there are some things
that look "silly" in retrospect, and this is probably one of them.

Luckily, there aren't many such places, so if you asked someone to draw
a line between Ada 95-only features and Ada 83 features, someone
with no experience in Ada 83 would have trouble doing so.  Even
some of us who used Ada 83 extensively now make the mistake of thinking
a given feature was "always" there (like 'Image on real types, or
child packages).

: Matt

--
-Tucker Taft   stt@averstar.com   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Technical Director, Distributed IT Solutions  (www.averstar.com/tools)
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