Re: Other Ada Standards (was Re: SIGada Conference)

["Alexandre E. Kopilovitch" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Peter Richtmyer wrote:

> >  The point of
> > with's is that you can see a summary of the interconnections between
> > compilation units all in one spot, right up front.
> > 
>
> I wish this were true! Just look in one place.
>
> However, take a not-too-unusual situation of a package spec and body 
> with a few "separate" routines, and perhaps some child packages 
> with a few separates each. "Good practice" says put the with's 
> down where needed, not all in the pkg spec. So in a child pkg 
> separate, you need to look in up to 5 different files to see 
> what might be used (with'd) by the separate. For the entire package, 
> you need to look at all the files to see what all the "interconnections"
> are.
>
> Or do you advocate putting them all in the spec?

Perhaps this is a case when an opportunity to centralize the whole context
explicitly - using the construct I mentioned in this newsgroup about a week
ago:

  package XXX context is
    with ...;
    ...
  end XXX;

  package body XXX context is
    with ...;
  end XXX;

would be useful. The most interesting value of (optional) separation of the
whole context (or, perhaps, part of it) is in that it eases various extentions
and ramifications of the notion of context. For example, "with" for private
part can be easily introduced, and specific contexts for separate routines
also may be incorporated in this condtruct without much difficulty.



Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia