Re: Extensible Enummerated types FW: When will next Ada revision be? (83, 95, ?)

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

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Robert Dewar wrote:
> In article
> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0101201408160.16701-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
>   Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Robert Dewar wrote:
> > > How about specifices, since not many languages support
> > > this capability (C and C++ do not even have enumeration
> > > types in the sense in which we are discussing things now
> > > after all :-)
> >
> > Objective Caml, since version 3.0, has something close,
> 
> Well er ... exactly my point, not to many people are using
> Objective Caml in their everyday programming tasks. So my
> question still stands, the claim was that this feature was
> being used in other programming languages (in common use),
> and I don't see that ...

Hmmph, I don't recall the "common/popular" qualifier in the original
question, and I thought we were trying to ascertain the utility of such 
a feature by looking at another language with the same or similar
features. The feature was added to Ocaml after it had proved its worth 
in OLabl, in particular for making the interfaces to some C libraries 
(like Tk and Gtk) more convenient. As I said, since Ada allows overloading
of enumeration names and OCaml didn't allow sum type "tag" overloading 
for the non-polymorphic variants, the argument for extending Ada is
significantly weaker than the argument for extending Ocaml with extensible 
variants.

I'd like to see the old proposals that you mention from the 9X process. It
is a shame that those documents are not more web friendly. 
 
As far as popularity goes, I bet OCaml is more widely used than many 
languages discussed here. Putting my C hat on, Ada is not very widely used
either, nor is SNOBOL, SETL, Modula-3, Oberon, ... . You'll have to define 
"in common use" more precisely, in order to keep Ada in that set and
others out ;-).

-- Brian