Re: Implicit Instantiations - was: Re: Why is Ada NOT a good choice for a beginner to programming?

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

> "Grein, Christoph" wrote:
> 
> > It is true, there are some places in Ada where implicit declarations or type
> > conversions are done, but implicit instantiations are as yet nowhere.
> 
> Implicit type conversions, along with implicit type promotions run
> counter to the Ada philosophy.
> 
> C++ does not provide the same kind of capability for declaring new
> numeric types one has in Ada.   This, in spite of the entertaining
> example from Mr. Rosen.
> 
> Typedef does not do the same thing.   We are still left with predefined
> types.
> 
> The whole idea of Ada is to declare types so they will be checked by
> the compiler and so mismatches will be caught.   If there is a problem
> with that, in the current standard, it needs to be fixed, but implicit
> conversions or promotions is simply a bad idea for this language.
> 
> Actually, I don't think there is really a problem here wrt Ada, even
> after reading your paper.
> 
> Richard Riehle

Richard,

from where in my paper do you get the impression that I might think there is a 
problem with Ada? I only state that there is no good way to do dimension 
checking during compile-time.

I find the C++ example doing compile-time checking intriguing and I thought it 
might be nice to have something like this in Ada. My concern was that adding 
implicit instantiations to Ada might harm other parts of the language. So we 
have 
the same opinion wrt this point.