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Subject:
From:
"Robert I. Eachus" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Robert I. Eachus
Date:
Thu, 10 Dec 1998 10:14:56 -0500
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> W. Wesley Groleau said:
>Some of the solutions to the "static variables" problem seem like an awful
>lot of engineering to emulate something that was poor engineering in the
>first place.  :-)

   There was an excellent paper on that subject many years ago: "Nesting in
Ada is for the birds" by Lori Clarke, et. al. (Presented at the SigAda
conference in 1982 in Washington DC, I think.) Of course, it covered more
than just
static variables.  For those who haven't read it, the paper argues strongly
that  you should almost never nested a subprogram declaration in Ada, you
should declare one or both subprograms in a package instead.  Not because
nesting doesn't work, but because the package idiom is much better. Of
course, nowadays we know so much more--nested procedures should sometimes
be used when they are really macros, or often when instantiating
Unchecked_Deallocation or Unchecked_Conversion.

                                        Robert I. Eachus

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