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Ada '83 Rationale, Sec 9.4: Summary and Conclusion
"Rationale for the Design of the
Ada® Programming Language"
[Ada '83 Rationale, HTML Version]
CHAPTER 9: Packages
A simple approach was taken for the package facility of Ada. Packages
provide the ability to encapsulate information. When defining a
package, the programmer simply states the visible information and
provides its implementation as a separate text - the package body. The
information contained in a package body is not (directly) available
outside the package body. Thus, packages support information hiding as
well as control of visibility.
The package facility is central to the definition of private data
types: it provides complete control over the available operations for
such types. Moreover, packages can be separately compiled and the
language also provides a parameterized form of package, called a
generic package.
All of these aspects are in many respects fundamental for program
development. Packages are used to construct libraries containing
common pools of data and types, application packages, and complete
systems.
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