Re: AQ&S Guidance on pragma Elaborate_Body

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

Matthew Heaney says

<<I'm talking about just a pair of abstract data types that are intimately
related.  But I sense that you and the other posters are talking about
large packages (say, a subprogram library such as binding).>>

Not necessarily, you can find lots of examples -- I am still surprised if
you really never ran across this in your own code. I have not seen any
large (say a couple of hundred thousand lines up) Ada program that did
NOT have this kind of mutual dependencies -- it is really a natural
consequence of any domain in which recursion is an important idiom.

For example, if we have a compiler with separate units to handle if statements
and loop statements, it is natural for if's to have loops and loops to have
if's. Surely you don't think this means that we have to put loops and if's
in the same unit -- because if you do you are syaing the whole compiler must
be one unit!

Another example is that Text_IO might well with some FPT conversion unit,
that might well have debugging statements that under a switch call
Put_Line in Text_IO.

and on and on and on ...