Re: AQ&S Guidance on pragma Elaborate_Body

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <mheaney-ya023680002404970907100001@news.ni.net> mheaney@ni.net (Matthew Heaney) writes:

> >That is incorrect, you can certainly create cases of legitimate programs
> >where the use of Elaborate_Body will cause elaboration circularities. A
> >trivial example is two packages, each of whose bodies with's the others
> >spec, which is not that uncommon.
> 
> It may be true that it "is not that uncommon," but mutual dependency of
> packages indicates that you have a pair of highly cohesive abstractions,
> and they should really be combined into a single package.

Hmmm, you're probably about the only one left here that believes this.
The "withing problem" (and this is for SPECS, not just the above sort
of case) has been discussed here extensively and the general consensus
is that this inability (to define mutually dependent types across
package boundaries) is a hole in the language.  The great maker
himself, STT, has come to hold this position.  BTW, anyone know
whatever became of Tucker's proposal of "with package.type" for
solving this??  I know it wasn't going to be "formally" accepted
somehow, but wasn't there going to be some sort of general agreement
to provide this?

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com