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: 103376,3d3f20d31be1c33a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Use use type? (Was Re: Safety-critical development in Ada and Eiffel) Date: 1997/07/21 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 257981850 References: Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-07-21T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Brian says <> If you think "use type" was a mistake you have to tell us (a) why you think that using "use type" makes programs harder to read. We are not particularly interested if your main reason for thinking it is a mistake is that it makes programs a (little bit) harder to write. (b) you have to suggest an alternative. Making operators automatically visible is not just a serious incomaptibility with Ada 83, it is also a significant design shift. The intention in Ada is very deliberately that things are NOT directly visible unless either used, or declared in the current unit. Violating this principle is not something to be done lightly, and again, you would have to explain why a change here would make it easier to read programs. I think you can certainly argue that "use type" *does* make programs easier to read, since it is far less syntactic burden on the reader than the alternatives which in practice people have otherwise used: (a) using prefix notation as in "and"(a,b) (b) introducing renamings all over the place Of course there are schemes even in Ada 83 of providing separate packages containing the renamings and using these, but that also clutters the program (though less than a and b).