Re: Announce: Grace project site operational

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

I see the usefulness of different numeric types coming into play with items
that have very distinct usages. For example, if I get data from a pressure
transducer and a temperature sensor and an RPM sensor and they were all 16
bit integers, I would want to make sure I didn't accidentally mix them up
because they all represent very different things with different units, etc.
There, I'd want separate types. But for a counter or index where typically
all I want to do is "for X in 1..Data_Structure_Size loop" I don't see a lot
of food value to be had by making all those unique types.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with a rule as to when it requires a separate
type and when it can use one of the predefined types. It sort of feels like
"art" to me. I'd suggest that it gains importance as the numbers in question
get closer to modeling something in the "real world". The closer it gets to
"internal housekeeping", the less interest I have in creating unique types
for it.

Of course strong typing has more to do than just avoiding the mixing of
numeric types. Think of arrays and records as well as parameter passing,
etc., where you get considerable protection from the type system against
mixing things up that shouldn't get confused.

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


"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> wrote in message
news:TP7CiYvFfPBT@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article <3CD94E63.3050607@mail.com>, Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
writes:
>
> And as an Ada programmer, I thank you for that diligence.
> I have a lot of "count" types in a program I am working on
> currently, and I would appreciate it if packages provided
> that, in the spirit of Ada.
>
> And I understand that the spirit of C++ might be different.