Re: private types

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

>>>>> "Jeffrey" == Jeffrey R Carter <spam.not.jrcarter@acm.not.spam.org> writes:
    >> MyInteger to be made visible outside the scope of PrivateType ?
    >> Doesnt it make the code less secure(for example,consider an
    >> "uninitialized" object of type PrivateType.MyInteger).

    Jeffrey> Because that's what private means in Ada.

He does have a point though - some languages will initialise all
variables to dummy values - this means you can get predictable results
in code that (wrongly) uses them before setting them to a value.

In this case it is possible to force initialisation (at least outside
the package), as per another poster's suggestion, because it is a
private type. Alternatively it is possible to turn it into a record
type and provide a default value for the component, as per another
post.

In other cases it isn't so easy, e.g. any non-private non-record type.

In fact, by default (at least last time I checked), gcc (or was that
gnat) doesn't check the validity of parameters to functions if the
type matches, even though the type hasn't been initialised and may
just happen to contain an illegal value.

I seem to recall Ada will initialise access types to null, and record
components (if defaults given), but nothing else.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>