Re: Visibility problems with package instantiations.....

[Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 30 Nov 2003 23:45:51 -0800, petter.fryklund@atero.se (Petter
Fryklund) wrote:

>Well 200 parameters was an overstatement trying to make a point. What
>I'm doing now is moving a way from child packages partly because when
>you reach level four,

In my present project I have dived down 5 levels of depth! (:-))

> the filenames becomes awfully long.

Egh, that should be no problem, if you aren't under MS-DOS.

But if you are eager to save keystrokes typing Ada code, then use
package renaming:

package ABCDEF renames A.B.C.D.E.F;

>And also,
>with two possible parents, which one should be choosen?

Both! However, unfortunately, Ada supports neither multiple parents
nor multiple inheritance. They are related things.

>Our CM policy
>also dictates a directory structure with every unit in it's own branch
>leading to a large tree.

It is a reasonable policy.

>So I'm now using the chain-saw strategy with
>generics. (I finally found a reasonable usage of unchecked conversion
>at level four.)

There are very limited number of cases where use of
Unchecked_Conversion could be reasonable. (:-))

>I still think that it would be nice to have a "box" syntax for
>parameters that aren't relevant.

If you are going to make an AI on generics and send it to ARG, then
add there
 
1. defaults for generic parameters;
2. a way to resolve conflicts in generic parameter names;
3. matching the actuals of generic subroutine with omitted default
parameters [It might be backward incompatible, as Christoph Grein
pointed];
4. generic formal dispatching subroutines;
5. generic dispatching subroutines;
. . .
666. automatic instantiations;
. . .
n. user-defined generic types

--
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de