From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,4ac6c27957bfd114 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net.POSTED!a6202946!not-for-mail From: Jeffrey Carter Organization: jrcarter commercial-at acm [period | full stop] org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: What is the point of Private? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 03:14:27 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 4.240.245.113 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net 1114744467 4.240.245.113 (Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:14:27 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:14:27 PDT Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10799 Date: 2005-04-29T03:14:27+00:00 List-Id: Simon Smith wrote: > Why is it there? I am sure I have heard talk that its to stop the client > from seeing exactly how the data is stored/manipulated however if people > really did want to know this wouldn't they just scroll down the ada spec > file and find out for themselves or am I missing something here? No, it was there originally to put stuff that the compiler needs to know to compile client code, but that the client code doesn't need to know to use the package. (Actually, the compiler probably doesn't need to know that stuff, and it could be put in the body, but in the late 1970's Ada's designers weren't willing to accept the extra work and overhead that would entail.) Now, it also serves to put stuff that will be visible to the private parts and bodies of children, but not to anyone else. -- Jeff Carter "Beyond 100,000 lines of code you should probably be coding in Ada." P. J. Plauger 26