Re: Possible Ada deficiency?

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> The main thing is that the compiler needs to know the size of a private
> type in order to allocate things, unless it treats all private types as
> dynamic-sized, which would be annoying -- you shouldn't have to pay an
> efficiency cost to get the benefits of encapsulation, information
> hiding, etc.  So if the full type were in the body, the compiler would
> have to look at the body (at least in optimizing mode).

It's always seemed to me that such types could be implemented as access 
types, allocated where declared, deallocated when they went out of 
scope, and with all operations dealing with the designated value, not 
the access value.

All such types would, of course, be passed by reference.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Sir Robin the-not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Lancelot,
who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor,
who nearly stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol,
and who had personally wet himself at the
Battle of Badon Hill."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
68