Re: Refactoring and Ada

[Christoph Grein <christoph.grein@eurocopter.com>]

> > I often find that people think that avoiding use clauses
> > avoids this, and requires full qualification. In fact in
> > the above example, suppose the only other occurrence of
> > f is in package p, then it is the case that trying to
> > qualify by writing
> > 
> >        a := p.f (x);
> > 
> > is not just unnecessary, but in fact illegal.
> 
> If I understand your example correctly, it reflects a problem
> which I recently had to fix in program written by someone else.
> We had the requirement not to use use and so the call of f had
> to be qualified as in your example above. The compiler complained
> about this of course and can you imagine what the programmer did
> in order to fix the problem? The type of x (B_Type) was derived from
> some other type (let's say A_Type). So the programmer wrote:
> 
>        a := p.f (p.A_Type(x));
> 

Silliness is indeed unbounded. The person requiring qualification of
of the call of f should have been sent to purgatory immediately.

The programmer should have declined to do this and explain the reason
why.

> The compiler was happy and in this particular case the program
> even did what it was assumed to do. The hidden bug in this
> statement is a maintenance time-bomb which would not have occurred
> if use had been used.

But I do not see how "use" comes into the picture here.

> Michael