Re: Problem with limited with

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

"Jeffrey Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> wrote in message 
news:ksv36l$tnc$1@dont-email.me...
> On 07/26/2013 03:17 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
>>
>> C'mon, people.  It should be possible to ask a question about the 
>> language
>> rules by posting a reduced case, without getting comments about why the
>> poster didn't write his code a different way, or why the identifiers 
>> aren't
>> descriptive, or why a complete working example wasn't posted or 
>> something.
>
> It should be possible to post a reduced example that actually uses the 
> feature
> that causes the problem.
>
> But even in that case, I'd still say the best solution is to avoid limited 
> with.
> Recursive types belong in the same pkg together. Limited with is a kludge 
> to let people write JavAda and should never have been added in the 1st 
> place.

I don't buy this. In a large system, it's very common to have types which 
are mutually related. If one is forced to put all such types into a single 
package specification, a large part of the entire system ends up in one 
giant package. And that eliminates a lot of Ada's advantages about reduced 
coupling and the ability to have multiple people working on a system without 
tripping over each other.

The Claw Builder ran into this problem in spades. The effort to avoid 
recursion was so severe that we essentially stopped working on it waiting 
for the ARG to decide how to handle the problem. The need to have types 
associated with both the generated code structure and with the structure of 
the application (and these are only slightly related) absolutely requires 
some sort of recursion system.

(And I don't know that much about Java -- I've never used it.)

                                           Randy.