Structured programming with limited private types in Ada

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Structured programming with limited private types in Ada: nesting if for the soaring eagles

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ACM SIGAda Ada Letters archive
Volume XI , Issue 5 (July/August 1991) table of contents

Pages: 79 - 90

Year of Publication: 1991

ISSN:1094-3641

Author

Henry G. Baker

Nimble Computer Corporation, 16231 Meadow Ridge Way, Encino, CA

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 3, Downloads (12 Months): 9, Citation Count: 9

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ABSTRACT

Many traditional styles of programming cannot cope with the limitations of Ada limited private types. We present a style of programming that enables structured programming in Ada with limited private types. The problem of "finalization" is safely and cleanly handled through the use of a generic package which guarantees that a variable of the limited private type will be finalized even in the presence of exceptions.Finalization is often desired in order to perform automatic garbage collection, whether by reference counting or by marking. We have proved our structured technique by developing a garbage-collected Lisp system in Ada in which the Lisp values are instances of a limited private type. The Ada code was so highly structured, that it was generated automatically using a simple compiler. The garbage collector in this system was easily and safely implemented, and different garbage collection techniques were tested without affecting user code.

REFERENCES

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CITED BY 9

	Magnus Kempe, Abstract data types are under full control with Ada 9X, Proceedings of the conference on TRI-Ada '94, p.141-152, November 06-11, 1994, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
	Henry G. Baker, Object-oriented programming in Ada83—genericity rehabilitated, ACM SIGAda Ada Letters, v.XI n.9, p.116-127, Nov./Dec. 1991
	Henry G. Baker, CLOStrophobia: its etiology and treatment, ACM SIGPLAN OOPS Messenger, v.2 n.4, p.4-15, Oct. 1991
	John Beidler, Relaxing the constraints on Ada's limited private types through functional expressions, ACM SIGAda Ada Letters, v.XII n.2, p.57-61, March/April 1992
	Henry G. Baker, Iterators: signs of weakness in object-oriented languages, ACM SIGPLAN OOPS Messenger, v.4 n.3, p.18-25, July 1993
	Henry G. Baker, Equal rights for functional objects or, the more things change, the more they are the same, ACM SIGPLAN OOPS Messenger, v.4 n.4, p.2-27, Oct. 1993
	Henry G. Baker, Linear logic and permutation stacks—the Forth shall be first, ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, v.22 n.1, p.34-43, March 1994
	Henry G. Baker, Safe and leakproof resource management using Ada83 limited types, ACM SIGAda Ada Letters, v.XIII n.5, p.32-42, Sept./Oct. 1993
	Henry G. Baker, The treadmill: real-time garbage collection without motion sickness, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.27 n.3, p.66-70, March 1992