Re: Ada 2005 Language Designer

[Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>]

In article <5436ED7B.9080109@gmail.com>, OneWingedShark@gmail.com 
says...

> > And you couldn't pass it as a parameter to any other subprogram,
> > nor return one from a function.
> 
> That would be an interesting feature.
> Sounds about on-par with LISP's macro functionality; and possibly like 
> the multi-staged compiler option one of the people on this forum was 
> advocating for Ada 202X.

Passing modules around as if they were ordinary objects is supported by 
some languages such as Scala. In fact Scala allows you to have multiple 
implementations of a module in the same program... similar to having two 
different package bodies for the same specification in a single Ada 
program. You can even store module objects in other data structures, 
e.g., put them in an array. It's actually quite elegant. However, those 
features are distinct from macros or multi-staged programming, at least 
in Scala's case.

Peter