Re: List Strawman JC01

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <un10ww4g1.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov>, Stephen Leake says...
>
>But this actually points to an inconsistency in Ted's current
>strawman. It says:
>   with function Reverse_Order (Left, Right : in Element) return Boolean;
>So it is currently using "Left" and "Right", rather than "Front" and
>"Back".
>
>Well, actually the Sort procedure doesn't say anything about
>direction. It needs to say "Direction is implicitly Front to Back", or
>it needs to take a Direction parameter.

Right on both counts. I noticed the second issue a couple of days ago, but
missed the first.

For the Sort procedure, I was thinking along the lines of actually providing a
direction as a generic parameter. My initial thought was to make it a parameter
to the procedure. But then we'd probably have to make it a parameter to the
other two routines too. If we did that, there's always the possiblity someone
will muck themselves up by sorting in one order and inserting or merging in
another.

There is the stance that this is unneeded, since picking a direction and making
the user reverse the logic on their predicate is all that is required to allow
for sorting in either direction. But this does make things more explicit, and I
think I've already gone over why I don't think there's a Right direction to
pick. :-)

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

No trees were killed in the sending of this message. 
However a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.