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Date: 14 Oct 92 20:30:03 GMT
From: aio!dnsurber@eos.arc.nasa.gov  (Douglas N. Surber)
Subject: Re: Generic Instantiation as Subprogram Body? (Clarification)
Message-ID: <dnsurber.719094603@node_26400>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In <11225@platypus.uofs.uofs.edu> beidler@guinness.cs.uofs.edu (Jack Beidler) w
rites:

>Since "<=" is equivalent to "not >" and ">=" is equivalent to "not <"

  [  lots of stuff about how to implement relational operators (and
     some bad manners) deleted   ]

>  function "<" (l, r : U) return boolean is

>     begin
>        . . .

>     end "<":


First of all this is a toy example of a general problem.  The purpose of 
the posting was not to find out how to implement the relation operators,
but rather to explore the issues relating to using generic
instantiations as the implementations of subroutines declared in a
package spec.  I'm sorry my original posting was not sufficiently clear
in that aspect, so I'll clarify.

There does not appear to be any clean way to use an instance of a
generic as the implementation of a subroutine declared in a package spec
without putting the instantiation in the spec itself.  If for some
reason I wanted to implement a subroutine in that fashion, I wouldn't
want that to be part of the spec.  It is an implementation detail and
doesn't belong in the spec.  So, three questions:

1) Is there anyway to do this other than the kludges I listed in my
   original posting?

2) If not, what was the rationale behind this restriction?

3) Has this been fixed in Ada 9X?

Once again, I know lots of ways to implement relations, I am trying to
understand a glitch in the language definition that improperly couples
the specification of a package with its implementation.

Douglas Surber
Lockheed
Houston, TX