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The Ada 95 Booch Components began in late 1994 when David Weller began a port of Grady Booch's C++ components.
A first beta release was soon available, followed by a release in February 1997.
In December of that year, David concluded that he wouldn't be able to continue with the Components and appealed on the Team Ada mailing list for a volunteer. Having already found the Components very useful, I got my employers' permission to take them on (not a speedy process); work began 18.vii.98.
Storage Management was added in August 1998 by Pat Rogers, thanks very much Pat! (you may like to visit Pat's web site).
The Components are issued under the Ada Community License. You can read David Weller's FAQ on the ACL.
(Please note, the Components are likely to change fairly dramatically between releases over the next few iterations. You'll probably need to change your source at each issue; you'll certainly need to recompile).
The current version has the following components available (the red parts are new since the last release):
See the Component Documentation for the details.
There is also a collection of contributions.
Please feel free to mail me with any thoughts you may have!
For active iterators, the new style uses a "factory" function New_Iterator, which dispatches on the concrete Container and returns an Iterator. This uses the fact that tagged types are passed by reference to allow a reference to the concrete Container to be kept behind the scenes.
You can see an example of this style in Map_Test;
procedure Test_Active_Iterator (M : in out Maps.Map'Class) is use Containers; use Maps; use MB; Iter : Containers.Iterator := New_Iterator (M); begin while not Containers.Is_Done (Iter) loop Put_Line (" Item: " & Containers.Current_Item (Iter) & " Value: " & Image (Maps.Current_Value (Iter).all)); Containers.Next (Iter); end loop; end Test_Active_Iterator;Passive iteration is handled via generics. In the same test, we might have had
procedure Test_Passive_Iterator (M : in out Maps.Map'Class) is procedure Visitor is new Maps.Visit (Process, M); Iter : Containers.Iterator := New_Iterator (M); begin Visitor (using => Iter); end Test_Passive_Iterator;Note, however, that iteration is broken under GNAT 3.10p! Please use GNAT 3.11p (or later).
This works fine except for Graphs; a Graph is a collection of Vertices (OK so far), while Vertices are connected by (not collections of) Arcs. Unless I can think of a sensible way of doing things, Graphs will remain outside the Containers hierarchy.
Although Trees come under the Container hierarchy, they aren't Containers. This is largely because of the difficulty of supporting standard Iterators in a non-linear structure like a Tree.
That said, I've tried to use a common style throughout.