C. Daniel Cooper wrote:
>
> Mike Brenner wrote,
>
> > Here is another statistic. To add it up carefully, you must not
> > just grep on the word with. You must filter out comments nad
> > quoted string and variable containing the word with as a substring.

> Of course, the counting also needs to consider that a context clause
> of the form "WITH Foo, Bar;" should count as *two* not one: the actual
> motivation is to reduce the number of dependencies, not the the number
> of clauses per se.

What about the use of renaming to package ( a subset of resources of )
other packages into one logically related chunk?
Thus

with X;
with Y;
with Z;

package XYZ is

  FOO renames X.FOO;
  BAR renames Y.BAR;
  FRED renames Z.FRED;
  BILL renames Z.BILL;
  ANYTHING_BUT_SUE renames Z.ANYTHING_BUT_SUE;

end XYZ;

And then a with of XYZ makes visible only those parts of X,Y, and Z that
you want.

Is this a sign of good structure? HECK NO! But if you're re-using
components, it may be that re-structuring is a luxury you can't afford.

I've not seen this used much, but when it was, it was relatively
innocuous, and hid a lot of relatively dangerous resources in the specs.
Yet it seems anathema to me, a sign of bad design.

Comments?
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