Re: Equality operator overloading in ADA 83

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

Fergus said

<<        - the names of operators
        - the names of procedures for which the compiler generates inline code
        - names to special-case when doing name mangling>>

OK, that's a very unusual (and I would think rather inconvenient and
inefficient) approach. The normal way of handling strings like this in a
compiler is to enter them into a hashed name table early on, and then
use keys to reference them from there on -- that way you do not have
strings wandering around the place. That's certainly something I teach
as a standard compiler technique in my compilers course. For an example,
see the Namet package in GNAT.

Certainly if names are wandering around as strings in your compiler, I
see how you would have case statements of this kind around!

Note that if you use a discrete type for the key, you can then write
case statements, for example, we could write in GNAT for the test of
sopecial names of procedures that atr intrinsic (the second case you
mention)

    case Name (Node) is
       when Name_Divide =>
       when Name_Plus =>
       ...

we would of course need a when others, but that you need naturally in
this case anyway.