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From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Functions vs constants
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 08:45:36 +0200
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Date: 2014-07-25T08:45:36+02:00
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On 25/07/14 06:56, Randy Brukardt wrote:

>> I disagree, because the client should perhaps be diagnosed broken, for
>> reasons of maintainability of references.
>
> Sorry, but that's not the real world. If I add something to Claw that breaks
> most existing clients, I'm going to get a bunch of annoyed (or worse)
> messages from customers. People are not interested in spending a lot of time
> "fixing" code that's previously worked and does not use any of the new
> stuff.

All right, the sledge hammer (fixing, not adding more duct tape) is typically
part of only bigger managerial changes. OTOH, new languages Hack, Swift and
Scala will be examples of how money or size can invalidate all such arguments.
They all preserve concepts, run-time, and thus knowledge, though.

> In what sense is Put for a
> String overriding Put for a Float? Dmitry covered this ground pretty well in
> his response.

His answer includes, actually, that for Put you need non-Ada only
if the file argument should be included in dispatching. Any Float
or String arguments could be passed to an overridden version of Put
determined statically.