Re: OOD in Ada?

[kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

"David Crocker" <dcrocker@eschertech.com> wrote in message news:<3d135676$0$8511$cc9e4d1f@news.dial.pipex.com>...
> I know that Ada95 tries to support O-O development, but from my perspective
> as an OO developer but Ada novice, it appears to me that any attempt to
> implement a large OO design in Ada will run into the following problems:
> 
> 1. The infamous "withing" problem (i.e. it is not possible to declare 2
> classes A and B, each in its own package, such that A has a method taking a
> paremeter of type "access B", and B has a method with a parameter of type
> "access A"); 

It's possible to do this in C++ but it's seldom a good idea.  Instead
one should declare all mutually dependent classes in a single header
file, and implement them in a single source file.  

The Java requirement of a separate file for each class forces one
to physically separate classes that aren't really separable.

Excessive inter-class dependencies make many large OO programs
almost unmaintainable.

> 
> 2. The lack of a "dot" notation (or anything similar) for calling a member
> method, making the code hard to read and hard to determine where dynamic
> binding may be taking place.

The C++ community is now questioning the value of the
"dot" notation for calling member functions.  Having two different
function call notations makes generic programming more difficult.