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From: "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
References: <910u3p$v9j$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <3A3445A8.8FC404D5@acm.org>
 <912ut9$fga$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <W5gZ5.6439$bw.518837@news.flash.net>
 <9143un$fev$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
Subject: Re: constant string array
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Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 04:39:39 GMT
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"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:9143un$fev$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
: In article <W5gZ5.6439$bw.518837@news.flash.net>,
:   "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote:
: > "Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
: > news:912ut9$fga$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
: >
: > : You can get some feeling for this by supposing that someone
: > : looking at the above code decides to replace
: > :
: > :    A : boolean;
: > :
: > : by
: > :
: > :    type motor_status is (on, off);
: > :    a : motor_status;
: > :
: > : with a revision history saying
: > :
: > :    use ON/OFF for motor status instead of True/False, makes
: > :    code clearer.
: > :
: > : Now the spelled out version is easily fixed, the compact
: > : one line "trick" version no longer works.
: >
: > Of course, if the underlying representation is important (0
: for False, 1 for
: > True), you may have broken some other things as well...
:
:
: Well such a dependence not properly documented is a pretty
: ugly thing. After all your paragraph above assumes you
: are using nasty low level stuff, and such low level stuff
: should be well documented and well isolated :-)

Just to be inordinately picky, I could argue that the original definition
implied a potential dependence on "two enumeration literals False and True
ordered with the relation False < True", which the maintainer arbitarily
ignored! Even if there's no low-level stuff going on, I might have declared
an array with a Boolean index (for example), relying on this property. At a
minimum, it would seem more logical to maintain the relation Off < On.