Re: parent package referring to child

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@acm.nospam.org>]

george@gentoo.org wrote:
> I have been faced with just such a problem, when writing a library to
> access abf files (a special data format used by the most common
> software in electrophysiology). I needed to define a record type with
> near a thousand fields (beat you here ;)) and did not want to put it
> all into the single spec. My solutions was exactly redesign, or rather
> I designed it from ground up to be appropriately split between the
> parent and child modules.

This perhaps makes sense for this specific situation (files with a 
number of different layouts, based on the data at the beginning of the 
file), but I don't understand this attitude in general. Given the basic 
package structure

package P is
    type T is ...

    procedure P1 (V : [mode] T ...);
    procedure P2 (V : [mode] T ...);
    ... -- Additional operations as needed.
end P;

why do some seem to think it's OK to have T declared here if the 
declaration is short, but not if it is (perceived to be) long? It's the 
same concept in both cases and should, I think, be implemented in a 
uniform way.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"You tiny-brained wipers of other people's bottoms!"
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
18