Re: 'withing' problem

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> writes:

> In article <3be27344$0$227$ed9e5944@reading.news.pipex.net>, David Crocker
> says...
> >the only company that needs the problem fixed urgently? How do the
> >developers of large military software systems manage?
> 
> Mutual dependancies of this sort in my book are a classic sign of a
> sloppy design. Thus we cope with this problem by cleaning up our
> design when this happens.

If you are coming from a UML-based modelling environment,
cross-dependency is entirely natural. It would be quite wrong to
contort the model to cope with Ada's unfortunate limitations in this
respect.

WITH TYPE (or equivalent) is a very natural way for the software
architecture to support this requirement (provided your independent
safety advisor will let you).

Without the compile-time type checking that WITH TYPE gives you, you
are likely to end up with (some) run-time checks which is a Bad Thing
if it can be avoided.