Re: type names (was Re: Child package: private type and IO)

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Sun, 1 Mar 1998, Matthew Heaney wrote:
> In article <6dcio1$fvo$1@berlin.infomatch.com>, blaak@infomatch.com (Ray
> Blaak) wrote:
> 
> >>Objects are the memory locations that store a value of a type.
> >
> >But you are using the word here as a type! (i.e. the set of things that are
> >memory locations that store values).
> 
> No.  You are confused about what a type is.
> 
> ... stuff I mostly agree with deleted ...
>
> In Ada, module and type are ORTHOGONAL language features.  This really
> confuses a lot of people, and I have no idea why.

Many programmers began their OO programming with (early) C++, or
Smalltalk, or may have read "Object Oriented Software Construction", and 
consider the conflation of module and type into class to be fundamental.
Perhaps Java programmers and "new C++" programmers will have an easier 
time of it, but I doubt it. 

OTOH, in some ways modules can be said to have a "type"; the ML family of 
languages (of which SML and Objective CAML are instances) have module 
systems in which modules ("structures" in ML) have "signatures" which are 
loosely like types, and "functors" which map structures to other
structures. Ada now provides some of this via generic formal package
parameters and null-bodied generic packages. 

> Do not name an access type Pointer, because access objects are not
> pointers.  If they were, then Jean Ichbiah would have chosen the keyword
> "pointer" instead of "access," right?

Funny, one of the first papers on Ada 9X that I read used "_Ptr" to name 
access types. I guess you should tell the author that he is confused, even 
though he was technical director of the design team ;-).

> >One shouldn't be so afraid to do something different, if one thinks it is an
> >improvement. How else can standards get better?
> 
> A bunch of guys from all over the planet with PhDs in computer science
> designed the language, and somehow they didn't come up with your "better
> idea."  Telling, isn't it?  If you think it is an improvement, perhaps that
> is because there is knowledge that you don't have.

A bunch of guys with PhDs from all over the planet think Ada sucks, some 
of them are very well respected too. Which PhDs are right? 

Argument from authority is unhelpful; while I agree (mostly) with every 
guideline you set forth, and found Ray's naming schemes awful, Ray Blaak
is right with his final lines. Try things out if you think you have a 
better way. 

-- Brian