Re: Record operations (Algebraic Data Types and printing)

[G. B. <nonlegitur@nmhp.invalid>]

Björn Lundin <b.f.lundin@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2018-10-10 20:13, G. B. wrote:
>> But are all Ada debuggers and simulators in such a state? I find staring at
>> trace logs unproductive in comparison.  Maybe, though, some programmers
>> like the challenge.
> 
> When a system is deployed, and there is no debugger attached,
> and an incident occur (malfunction/crash/whatever),
> I am very happy to look at the logs.
> Debugging is then not an option, since it occurred in the past,
> and may be very difficult - if not impossible -  to reproduce.
> 

(Side note: interpreting messages and stack traces, foreign and own, of
various qualities is part of my job description.)

Technical impossibility of debugging a failure from the past is  beside the
point, IMHO, as ‘Image would, by default, just dump textual representations
of internal data structures. Potentially including all kinds of information
that may be private in at least two senses, unless... First, minor
issue(?), Ada structures that you don’t want partners in business to know,
that you don’t want them to build something around, based on knowledge
gleaned from traces. I don’t like that kind of secrecy myself but you know
what programmers do when they take some implementation for granted,
ignoring the interface. Plus, there are business reasons. In any case,
these are called internal data structures for a reason. Second, if private
components become visible, that’s generous, but even technically the
correspondence with ‘Value should not be a victim of  supporting lazy
programmers’ easy ‘Image. I/O just isn’t, even for trace analysis.

So, unless you start “overriding” ‘Image ... — But! For which of those use
cases? Dmitry, should ‘Image be capable of MD as needed per use case?

It is easy to be tempted by ease of use of ‘Image!

 ‘Image turns us into a human interpreters of haphazard Lisp like symbols
in the end. Some programmers enjoy themselves doing this kind of
recreational symbolic mathematics.