Re: Specialization of generics

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9ffnvi$qtl$1@news.huji.ac.il>, Ehud Lamm says...
>
>> Now the question: Is it possible to define a generic package taking
>> one or more types as generic formal parameters, and then define that
>> the generic is instantiated in a different way if the generic formal
>> parameters match some condition?  One application I could think of
>> would be for an image package to handle 1-bit images in a compact way.
>>
>
>Short answer is that generic specialization as such doesn't exist in Ada.
>I am sure others will give plenty of useful suggestions how to overcome this
>problem.

Right. For me the easiest is to just have two generics (one for each
"specilization"). Common code can be put in a separate (possibly non-generic)
package that both generics can use. For instance, we have a set of packages here
for performing multilinear interpolation for specified points using a matrix of
values. There's a generic which allows you to instantiate for the number of
dimensions you want to use. But for 1 dimension and 2 dimensions the algorithms
are much simpler, so they each have their own (non-generic) package.

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