Re: Should MI be supported (was: Can MI be supported?)

[Matthew Heaney <matthewjheaney@earthlink.net>]

Lionel.DRAGHI@fr.thalesgroup.com writes:

> We use simple inheritance. We use mixin (and never run into case where
> mix-in needs to access the whole), We didn't use multiple views (but
> this is possibly due to design pratices). And, for now, I have never
> encountered a "true" case of MI (there is more than half a million Ada
> lines).

In my experience multiple views are more useful than mixins, but YMMV.


> Thats why i think Ada 95 was well designed, by addressing the most common
> needs : simple inheritance and mixins.
> Mutiple views idiom translate awkwardly in current Ada, but who cares? It's
> not useful enough to add some new cleaner syntax to the language for now.
> The important thing is that there is at least an idiom.

I disagree with both of your statements that the "syntax is awkward" and
that multiple views aren't "useful enough," but agree that it does get
the job done.  (I like the multiple views idiom, and I don't think it
gets used enough because many programmers don't really understand it, or
how to do it.)