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From: Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org>
Subject: with'ing a "foreign" package or subsystem
Date: 1999/02/28
Message-ID: <m3g17qcc3u.fsf@mheaney.ni.net>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 449682635
Sender: matt@mheaney.ni.net
NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 15:57:41 PDT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-02-28T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Suppose my company and another company are collaborating on building a
large software system written in Ada.  We each go off and separately
build the subsystems we're responsible for, and then come together some
time later for system integration.

During development, I needed a stack, and I implemented the following
package:

generic
  type Item_Type is private;
package Stacks is ...;

and my company has been using it for a while.

But come integration time, the other company (call them ACME) had also
written package Stacks, but with a different interface, and they're
using their version of Stacks everywhere.

Can both packages coexist in the same application?  Is there a way to
give a package a "virtual" subsystem, to prevent name-space conflicts
like this?  Something like:

package ACME.Stacks renames <ACME company's "Stacks">;

I seem to recall reading something like this in the Ada95 Rationale, but
don't know if any vendor has actually provided such a mechanism.  

In any case, what is the intended mechanism for resolving library-level
name-space conflicts?

Curious,
Matt