Re: on package naming, should the word "_pkg" be part of it?

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

Vincent Marciante <marciant_remove@li.net> writes:

> > <snip> 
> > type Car is record ... end record;
> > 
> > Car : Car;
> > 
> > This is natural, but illegal. The easiest (for _me_, not for
> > everyone!) way to resolve it is to add some "noise" to either the
> > object or the type. Since the object name will appear more often than
> > the type, I add noise to the type:
> > 
> > type Car_Type is record ... end record;
> > 
> > Car : Car_Type;
> 
> If you declare the type in another package then you do not 
> have to add any "noise" to the simple type name.  

True. But I'm mostly thinking of parameters for primitive operations
on a type (see below). The above is just the simplest example that
shows the Ada limitation (merged object and type namespace).

> By the way, your argument above implies that you are expecting to
> any have one object of the type. In my experience, It is rare to
> have only one object of a type - I would not add _type to all type
> definitions as a convention just to make the rare case "easy" to
> deal with.

A better example would be:

package Cars is 

    type Car_Type is ...;

    procedure Foo (Car : in Car_Type);

    procedure Bar (Car : in Car_Type);

end package Cars;

You can come up with alternatives to any individual use of _Type. But
in my experience, _Type is the only alternative that works in _all_
situations; generic instantiations in particular get very fussy about
names.

-- 
-- Stephe