Re: Queue

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net>]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Matthew Heaney wrote:
> "Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in
> message news:9u0qhb$pq5$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> > I'd still be willing to settle on the BC's with some enhancements and
> > extensions. Anybody else willing to go that route?
> 
> No.  The problem with the Booch Components is that they use inheritance,
> which is completely unnecessary unless you require dynamic polymorphic
> behavior.
> 
> The C++ STL doesn't use inheritance.  The use of iterators and algorithms
> abstracts away the details of specific containers, and thus treats all
> collections as a "sequence."  This is a form of static polymorphism.

Interestingly enough, there was a proposal to do something like this
(very much like the C++ STL) in Ada circa 1990. I mentioned it loooong 
ago, maybe in 1997 when there was some discussion of the STL here. I
forget the author's name, but she was a prof at some South African
university. What's interesting to me is that this was completely
independent of the STL line of work. I can dig up the ref if anyone is
interested. 

Doing an STL like library in Ada is certainly possible, but it will never
fit as snugly with Ada as the STL does with C++, for a number of reasons. 

> The standard library should provide only the most basic primitives, from
> which higher-level abstractions can be constructed.

I agree completely. To do otherwise would be an abstraction inversion. You 
can build a safe library on top of a fast one, but not vice-versa. 

-- Brian