Re: Is Ada the future? [was: Is C++ the future?]

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

It is true that you can "defeat" the private abstraction by making an
"unauthorized" child package, but then you can also do this by simply
editing the spec or body of the package in the first place. A child is
an extension of a package. Generally speaking one would expect from a
configuration management point of view that writing children would be
strictly controlled, on a level comparable with the control used over
the package providing the abstraction in the first place.

Basically you can extend a package either by adding declarations to it,
or by adding a child package. The latter may be more convenient from a
modularity point of view, but from a configuration management point
of view the two methods of extension should be treated as both requiring
appropriate and comparable control.