Re: Literals for Private Types

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Alexandre E. Kopilovitch wrote:
> Near 3 weeks ago I sent to Ada-Comment mailing list my proposal for literals
> for private types. As no reaction followed there, I concluded that the proposal
> sank in silence. Therefore I decided to post a brief and informal exposition
> of that proposal here in comp.land.ada (I suppose that those people who might
> be interested in full and more formal version are subscribed to Ada-Comment
> and therefore already saw it). Here it is:

Actually, quite the opposite, there has been a huge discussion on the 
ARG list about AI-318 (Returning [limited] objects without copying) and 
AI-325 (Anonymous access types as function result types).  What we are 
converging on will probably be by far the biggest change in Ada 0Y from 
current Ada.  (And IMHO a very big improvement.)

The net result, assuming that we do get all the loose ends tied up and 
reach consensus, will be that it will be possible to initialize limited 
objects either with an aggregate, or something similar to a function. 
(The 'something similar to part' means that we think that these special 
constructors need a flag in the syntax, since the calling sequence 
generated needs to be different, but haven't agreed on what the new 
syntax should look like.)

But any action on something else involving functions of limited types 
(literals are notationally a function in Ada, as are some attributes) 
will only occur after we get the ground rules for initializing limited 
objects nailed down.  I think that for some reason some of the 
discussion is in AI-325 not AI-318 on the website.  If you want to look 
at the current discussion be sure to allocate a couple of days.  The 
many of the issues go deep into compiler internals, and there are a lot 
of pages of discussion there.  There have been days where I had trouble 
keeping up in real-time, and as you can see, Randy, Tucker and I are the 
main posters.

-- 
                                           Robert I. Eachus

100% Ada, no bugs--the only way to create software.