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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Is this expected behavior or not
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:24:10 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:14713
Date: 2013-03-25T17:24:10-05:00
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"Shark8" <onewingedshark@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:c231e327-0859-4430-adfc-ed4de4de2208@googlegroups.com...
> On Friday, March 22, 2013 8:33:02 PM UTC-6, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>>
>> I'd never trust any program with more than a handful of generics, it's 
>> just
>> too hard to get the compilers to handle those right).
>
> That seems a bit odd... I would think that once you had a generic* method 
> for handling overloading you could apply that to generics as well.
>
> [* Pun intended.]

It's the combination of a wealth of things, overloading is the easy one. 
Certainly a shared implementation (like the one in Janus/Ada) makes 
everything harder, but there are enough oddities in the handling of formals 
that it won't ever be easy. It's really the result of having a strong 
contract model for generics; that prevents using simple textual substitution 
for thing. Of course, you need a strong contract model if you want the 
generic to be correct without knowing anything about the instantiations. 
(Same as you do for subprograms.)

                                  Randy.