Re: HELP: renames and enum values

[Dale Stanbrough <dale@cs.rmit.edu.au>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "another way" here, this
> is the ONE and ONLY method to get the effect of "renaming"
> types, and is absolutely standard Ada, and yes it works fine.
> 
> And who knows what beginners might or might not think of, but
> any decent Ada book should point out this standard usage. The
> RM of course is quite clear on the semantic effect of such
> a declaration, and that's the end of its responsibility, the
> RM gives the (fairly) formal definition of the language, it is
> not in the business of pointing out how it can be used :-)
> 

All i was attempting to say is that 

   type blah renames bleh;

could be predicted to have the same semantics as a subtype
declaration (this would be the "other way" of performing
subtyping).

I know what beginners think of, because I had 8 years of 
teaching beginners. This is something that some of them
thought of (but not many because most of them were introduced
to subtypes long before renames!).

I do understand the use of subtype, but I was just wondering
if there were some fundamental reason why a renames for a type
would be excluded (apart from not wanting two ways to do the
same thing).


Dale