Re: Announce: Grace project site operational

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Not everything needs to have its own type. This is (IMHO) a typical
"beginner" mistake - someone gets sold on the notion of "strong typing" (A
Good Thing)then goes to the extreme of having a unique type for everything
(A Bad Thing) - which just makes life very confusing and difficult. There is
such a thing as "Overkill".

Subtypes are often a good alternative when you're dealing with things that
have some known constraint, but even there I don't think its necessary for
every counter or index in a program to be of its own unique subtype. I don't
see anything wrong with a generic package for containing unknown objects to
return a count of whatever its holding as a type Natural and leave it to the
user to convert it to some other type if they really think they need to. You
know the number should never be negative and Natural'Last is probably big
enough for any collection of stuff in memory. Given the likely uses of a
"Length" function, I doubt it would cause much trouble.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:3CD91E31.1060004@telepath.com...
>
>
> I'm not sure I understand either the question or the suppossed problem.
> The only way you could possibly get different types back for a size
> operation would be if there *were* such a generic parameter.
>
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