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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Should weak counted reference be able to be strengthened?
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 15:49:49 -0600
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:23720
Date: 2014-11-25T15:49:49-06:00
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:1xbl1kdcf9at5.1dfv4py4kvx0o.dlg@40tude.net...
...
> Instead of introducing "crazy beautiful" implicit dereference, Ada 2012
> should have delegation support for the patterns like this.

Depending heavily on interfaces is a sure way to madness. :-)

But the real problem here is I don't see any way to add "delegation support" 
that actually saves much over the explicit version that you showed. We 
certainly don't want *everything* to delegate (it has to be declared somehow 
for the particular operations in question), and because of overloading we 
have to at least have the complete profile. That means an awful lot of 
typing (and source text to read), and lots of chance for errors.

In a sense, Ada 2012 has delegation support as one can use expression 
functions that way. (If I had gotten the full design in place, they could 
have been used with an interface type to provide a default implementation as 
well, which could have been designed to delegate. But we left out the two 
options for expression functions [staticness, and the interface cases].)

                                   Randy.