Re: Container reqs

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

"Ehud Lamm" <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il> writes:

> Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in message
> news:un12nod47.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov...
> > Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com> writes:
> >
> > > Ehud Lamm wrote:
> > > > <snip>
> > > > What I dodn't like is the need for several, possibly nested,
> instantiations
> > > > simply to get a simple queue or hash table.
> > >
> > > I wholeheartedly agree. Wright's posting here a few days ago of the
> > > sequence of instantiations needed to obtain a simple structure with the
> > > Booch components clearly indicates that they fail this requirement.
> >
> > This is easy to say. But can you provide an alternative, that still
> > allows the container to handle all reasonable Ada types?
> >
> > People have made the same complaint about my library. But that
> > complexity is simply a reflection of the complexity that Ada supports.
> > I don't see a simple alternative that is not so restrictive as to be
> > useless. Well, you could maintain several copies of the code, each
> > accepting slightly different generic formal types. But _I'm_ not going
> > to do that!
> >
> 
> 
> Yep. I agree entirely.<p>
> But since I find this point to be important for using the library in
> education, I wanted to hear ideas and possible solutions.<p>
> What I was thinking about was having wrapper packages, for the most
> important cases. I don't think this will turn out to be a mjor overhead. And
> it should ease the learning curve, even for experts, since these packages
> will be, in essence, example code...

Well, examples are always useful. And I have helper packages to make
things simpler in the "simple" cases. There is test code that serves
as examples for my library; other examples would probably be helpful.

Perhaps you could volunteer to define the "typical most important
cases", and I'll write example code for them, for my library. If it
seems reasonable, I'll also try to write a "simple wrapper" package.
Then someone else can try to do the same with each of the other
candidate libraries. That should be a good learning exercise. It might
also make it easier for potential users to compare the libraries:

"Let's see. It takes 42 lines and 5 packages to get a list of integers
with SAL, and 52 lines in 3 packages with BC. Which should I use?"

Hopefully it won't be that simplistic :).

Hmm. I suppose more learning would occur if we each did the examples
for someone _else's_ library. But I don't have the time ...

-- 
-- Stephe