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From: "Steve" <nospam_steved94@attbi.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
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Subject: Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula
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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
news:av6gr5$cgael$1@ID-77047.news.dfncis.de...
> Steve wrote:
>
> >   Ada has no equivalent to Pascal's "with" statement (if you've
maintained
> >   a
> > lot of Pascal code, you know why this is an advantage).
>
> In fact Ada 95 has an equivalent of Pascal's "with":
>
> X : Some_Type renames An.Extremely.Long.Path.Name.Object;
>

After maintaining both Pascal and Ada code, I wholeheartedly disagree that
Ada's renaming is equivalent to Pascal's with.

If you're trying to analyze Pascal code that looks something like:

  with a, b, c, d do
    begin
       field1 := fieldA
    end;

Tracking down where the !@** field1 and fieldA come from is non trivial.  In
fact if these fields exist in more than one of the a, b, c, d records it may
be compiler dependent.

With Ada's renaming you can easily track a field back to its source.  You
may have to sift through a few renamings, but in practice this is easy to
do.

Side note: I worked on a Pascal to Ada translator that converted with blocks
to declare blocks with renaming.  A few bugs became readily apparent when
the full qualification in the renaming was shown.

Steve
(The Duck)

> --
> Regards,
> Dmitry A. Kazakov
> www.dmitry-kazakov.de