Re: Ada requires too much typing!

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Maciej Sobczak" <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:fef531f2-0f35-4ba5-8e79-9ae59e2a6a25@x21g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
> On 10 Cze, 08:13, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
...
>> (Probably copying a crappy design from some other
>> language.) There should be almost no visible access types
>
> Well, not so fast. Access types are necessary for referring to
> existing objects.
> Think about request handlers in AWS, for example - the idea is that
> objects are *registered* somewhere for future use. How would you do
> that without access types? At least obtaining the 'Access value is
> necessary, even if the explicit use of access variables can be
> avoided.

I'm talking about in the interfaces. Ada always allows you to take 'Access 
of tagged parameters, so the implementation of a class can surely do that if 
needed. But it should never, ever, expose that cruft to the clients.

This is exactly how Claw works: a mess of access type cruft under the 
covers, almost no access types in the interfaces. The only existing access 
types are used to return access to existing objects; that will remain in the 
Ada 2012 design but it will be safe (unlike in the Ada 95 Claw design) 
because the lifetime of the returned access will have to be shorter than the 
existing objects (absent Unchecked_Deallocation, the destroyer of all that 
is safe ;-), and you won't actually have to write any of the dereferencing 
(it will look syntactically like you are reading/modifying the object itself 
in place).

                                            Randy.