Re: Ada 2005 Language Designer

[Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 10/08/2014 11:30 AM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> 
> A package is not an object, neither in the sense defined by the Ada RM nor in
> any other relevant sense.  You can't create multiple instances of it.  And
> being able to create a variable object (or constant object, or expression
> that produces an object) and use the dot-notation to call an operation of
> that object is one of the things programmers came to expect of OO languages
> that Ada 95 didn't give them; Package.Operation notation is not close to the
> same thing.

Pkg as object was a standard technique for implementing OO designs in Ada 83, in
which a pkg represented an object in the design. Multiple instances were
sometimes implemented as instantiations of a parameterless generic pkg. That
seems like a relevant sense of "object" to me.

Of course, you couldn't have components of such things, so they clearly weren't
objects in the Ada sense.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I would never want to belong to any club that
would have someone like me for a member."
Annie Hall
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