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Grogono, P., and Sakkinen, M. Copying and comparing: Problems and solutions. In ECOOP'00, E. Bertino, Ed. Springer-Verlag, Cannes, France, June 2000.
Saw this paper mentioned on the ll1 mailing list.
This is an important issue, and the paper makes for ok reading.
Section 5.2 gives language design guidelines that are worthy of consideration.
Ada isn't discussed in the paper, which is a shame. Ada makes a basic distinction between limited and non-limited types. Limited types (which include types the user marks as limited as well as things like tasks and protected types) don't provide equality and assignment operations. For non-limited types deafult assignment and equality operations are defined. The equality function can be overloaded, where as the semantics of assignment can be changed by supplying an appropriate procedure (called Adjust).
Posted to OOP by Ehud Lamm on 4/1/03; 6:48:04 AM
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Copying and Comparing: Problems and Solutions
