Re: Possible Ada deficiency?

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

danmcleran@hotmail.com wrote:

> There's one problem with this analogy. In C++, a class grants
> friendship status to other classes and/or functions. In Ada, a child
> package assumes friendship with the parent package whether the parent
> likes it or not.

This was considered a weakness in C++, that possible friends have to be 
known when the class is created, or the class has to be modified to 
allow new friends. The Ada-95 project felt that extensibility was better 
served by not requiring such a mechanism.

 > I understand your point about packages vs. tagged types. I still
 > believe that it would be a good thing to have a mechanism to hide
 > impelmentation detail from child packages. Otherwise, anyone could
 > write a package as a child of another and expose a public interface to
 > the outside world that could change the private area of its parent
 > package.

Not that I necessarily disagree with you. See Carter, J., "Breaking the 
Ada Privacy Act", /Ada Letters/, 1996 May/Jun.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I've got to stay here, but there's no reason
why you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby
until this thing blows over."
Horse Feathers
50