From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,4bc0e5c544f4d1eb X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: question on variant record Date: 1996/11/14 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 196593710 references: organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-11-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Matthew Heany said "The technical term is "discriminant," not "tag field." And technically, a "variant record" is a discriminant record only with a variant part (case statement). You probably meant "discriminant record" in your subject line." variant record is a perfectly good term, see for example para 35 of the introduction to the RM: 35 Record, task, and protected types may have special components called discriminants which parameterize the type. Variant record structures that depend on the values of discriminants can be defined within a record type. variant_part is a perfectly good syntactic term, so the term variant record is a perfectly reasonable one, it means a record with a variant part. The other term is discriminaTED record, which is a record type with discriminants. Note that all variant records have discriminants, but not all records with discriminants have variant parts, so variant record is a useful term. P.S. the term discriminant record is not used in the RM.