Re: Ada95 OOP Questions

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Bob Duff said

"Agreed.  But the language designers can't think of everything, so it may
well be that there some rules that really should be absolute, and yet
didn't get into the language.  I can't think of any at the moment (in
the case of Ada 95).  ;-)"


Yes, indeed, it is useful if people realize that whenever they feel like
imposing an absolute style rule, they are in fact commenting on the language
design, and declaring that some aspect of it was wrong. Now there is nothing
unreasonable about making such a conclusion, but you need to invest some
effort to understand why a feature is in the language. It was not put there
for idle amusement.

If you propose a style rule "never use feature X", then it is quite likely
the case that you are simply unaware of some important use of feature X.
For example, I have now seen several Ada environments in which the Ada
style rule is "never use unchecked conversion", and as a result, pieces
of the program are written in C which could perfectly well be written in
Ada.