Re: some trivial questions?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:ouotuh$1ig3$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 2017-11-18 02:14, Randy Brukardt wrote:
...
>> Changing names of overloadable things is not a maintenance hazard unless 
>> the
>> things have the exact same profile. (And that's a problem by any 
>> definition,
>> having two identical entities with different meanings.)
>
> And if they are not overloadable I still can use long names. Use-clause 
> makes nothing worse than already is.

Giving things junk names to avoid name conflicts is more evil than even 
package use clauses. ;-) See the bogus naming conventions of C systems where 
encoded type names are jammed into other things. That makes it all the 
harder to model the problem space (rather than the solution space).

>> An alternative fix for this problem would be to make more things 
>> (preferably
>> all things) overloadable. But that would cause some existing Ada code to
>> silently change meaning, which is considered unacceptable. (It also would
>> require some sort of meta-types, which I'd rather not try to get into, 
>> but
>> that's a detail.) So it's not going to happen for Ada.
>
> Sure, nothing useful going to happen for Ada.

I agree that this is annoying. The problem is that an incompatible Ada would 
be starting over from scratch (as existing libraries would not be usable), 
and whether such a thing could get traction (and get new versions of GTK and 
Claw and Dmitry's libraries, and so on.) is unknown. If it didn't get 
traction, it would be of little practical interest - and a lot of work.

                                                 Randy.