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

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

"Grein, Christoph" wrote:

> > "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.

Chris,

Sorry if I misread something in your paper.

Richard