Gem #48: Extending Interfaces in Ada 2005
by Quentin Ochem —AdaCore
Let's get started…
The classic OOP way
Let's assume we have the following interface:
type Animal is interface; procedure Eat (Beast : in out Animal) is abstract;
All types implementing the Animal interface have to override the Eat operation:
type Cat is new Animal with record ... procedure Eat (Beast : in out Cat);
Now, after a while, the developer of Animal might feel the need to let animals eat something specific, and would like to add the following operation to the interface:
procedure Eat (Beast : in out Animal; Thing : in out A_Thing);
Unfortunately, there are hundreds of species of animals implementing this interface, and having to migrate everything will be too painful. Not to mention that most of them don't even need this new way of eating - they're just happy eating some random amount of anonymous food. Extending this interface is just not the way to go - so the extension has to be done separately, in a new interface, such as:
type Animal_Extension_1 is interface; procedure Eat (Beast : in out Animal_Extension_1; Thing : in out A_Thing) is abstract;
So now, Animals that need to rely on this new way of eating will need to be declared, such as:
type Cat is new Animal and Animal_Extension_1 with record ...
Note that it's even possible to enforce the fact that an extension of Animal has to be an Animal in the first place, by writing:
type Animal_Extension_1 is interface and Animal;
which will lead to a simpler declaration for type Cat, as there's no longer a need to extend from two interfaces:
type Cat is new Animal_Extension_1 with record ...
The rest of the code will remain completely untouched thanks to this change. Calls to the new subprogram will require some additional amount of work though, as we'll first have to check that the type of an Animal that we're dealing with is indeed a descendant of Animal_Extension_1, and perform a conversion to that interface's class, before calling the new version of Eat:
The_Animal : Animal'Class := ... if The_Animal in Animal_Extension_1'Class then Animal_Extension_1'Class (The_Animal).Eat (Something); end if;
The Ada 2005 Way
Ada 2005 introduces the notion of null procedures. A null procedure is a procedure that is declared using "is null" and logically has an empty body. Fortunately, null procedures are allowed in interface definitions - they define the default behavior of such a subprogram as doing nothing. Back to the Animal example, the programmer can declare the interface's Eat primitive as follows:
procedure Eat (Beast : in out Animal; Thing : in out A_Thing) is null;
All of our hundreds of kinds of animals will automatically inherit from this procedure, but won't have to implement it. The addition of this declaration does not break source compatibility with the contract of the Animal interface. Moreover, as no new types are involved, it's a lot easier to make calls to this subprogram - no more need to check membership or write a type conversion, and we can just write:
The_Animal : Animal'Class := ... The_Animal.Eat (Something);
which will execute as a no-op except for animals that have explicitly overridden the primitive.