"Yannick Duch�ne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote in message 
news:op.vca852lexmjfy8@garhos...
> Hi all and Hi others as well,
>
> My dirty stuff of the day : why is Stream_Access not defined once a time 
> in Ada.Streams and is instead defined elsewhere multiple times, like in 
> Ada.Streams.Stream_IO, Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams, 
> Ada.Wide_Text_IO.Text_Streams and Ada.Wide_Wide_Text_IO.Text_Streams ?
>
> Isn't it funny design ?

Ada 95 didn't have anonymous access returns, so a named type had to be 
defined. I suspect that there was no intent that it be used for anything 
other than defining the result of these functions -- and there was no intent 
that that result be stored: just directly dereferenced and passed to a 
stream attribute.

If we were writing it today, I'm pretty sure that no named type would be 
used at all. But making a change like that now would be incompatible.

                                Randy.