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From: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:06:04 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2004-09-11T12:06:04+00:00
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Kevin Cline <kevin.cline@gmail.com> wrote:

: Explicit static typing ala Ada and C++ definitely has a cost,

Yes. (And you get something in return, too?)

: because it makes the code longer,

Sometimes I prefer a few explicit words to brevity when brevity would
hide things away.

: and also makes it more brittle.

Hm. Brittle? Your example could be a design issue. In Ada you could have
written

   generic
      type FPT is digits <>;
   function compute(x, y: FPT) return FPT;

or

   generic
      type FPT is digits <>;
   package Computations is ...

I'm confident that changing the floating point type might not have
required adjusting a lot of calls?

Related to making changes to parameter profiles,
subtype declaractions and type declarations offer at least one choice:

-  use (possibly constraining) subtypes where you expect slight changes
   to the range of values passed.  (Use T'base type parameters if a
   function needs to be more general.)

-  use types where the domain objects are different, or where things
   should be handled separately in code.


-- Georg