Constant element in Ada object? - ada

Question

In Java or C#, you would often have class members that are final or readonly - they are set once and then never touched again. They can hold different values for different instances of the class.
Is there something similar in Ada? I've tried to create something similar in Ada thusly:
package MyPackage is
type MyObject is limited new OtherPackage.Object with private;
....
private
type MyObject (...) is limited new OtherPackage.Object with
record
M_MyField : Integer := 10;
M_MyConstantFactory : constant Factory.Object'Class := new Factory.Object;
end record;
end MyPackage;
This fails on the declaration of M_MyConstantFactory saying constant components are not permitted. Is there a way around this? A colleague suggested declaring it somewhere else in the package, but that would mean a single M_MyConstantFactory shared across all instances, which is not what I want.
Do I need to just accept that it is possible to modify the value once set and manually guard against that happening?

Answer 1

No. Not quite.
If your component is of a discrete type or an access type, you can make it a discriminant, and thus make it immutable.
with Ada.Integer_Text_IO;
procedure Immutable_Components is
type Instance (Immutable : Positive) is null record;
A : Instance := (Immutable => 1);
begin
Ada.Integer_Text_IO.Put (A.Immutable);
-- A.Immutable := 2; -- assignment to discriminant not allowed:
end Immutable_Components;

Answer 2

Before I answer the question, it would probably be helpful to distinguish between Ada and Java/C#'s modeling of objects. In Java, everything is an object, and so all constants have to be final -- in Ada things are a bit different, Ada's object-system ("tagged types" in Ada parlance) is built upon two items: records and type-derivation. This means that, when teaching OOP, we could arrive gradually introducing first type-derivation (eg Type Degree is new Integer;), then records (ie encapsulation), then private-types (ie information-hiding), and finally unifying everything together with tagged-types... all of which I'll assume you are cognizant of.
In Ada, a constant is just that: some object that can be read but [generally] not written to. (Things can get funny with eg memory-mapped IO.) So we could say:
Package Ex1 is
Type Stub1 is private; -- Some type, with almost nothing public.
C1 : Constant Stub1; -- A constant of that type.
Private
Type Stub1 is tagged record
Data_1 : Integer;
Data_2 : Float;
end;
-- And now we can tell the compiler what C1 _is_.
C1: Constant Stub1 := (Data_1 => 3, Data_2 => 1.2);
End Ex1;
That's how we'd make a constant for a tagged type while keeping its implementation details hidden; though, admittedly, we could have exposed everything and gotten rid of the entire private section.
Now we get to an interesting feature of records [and tagged types] called discriminants -- these are kind of like constants, and kind of like generic-types in other languages. With discriminants we could make a message-type that varies in size according to the message-length:
Package Ex2 is
Type Message(Length : Natural) is private; -- A message.
Function Create( Text : String ) return Message;
Private
Type Message(Length : Natural) is record
Data : String(1..Length) := (Others => ' '); -- Defaults to space-filled string.
end;
Function Create( Text : String ) return Message is
( Data => Text, Length => Text'Length );
End Ex2;
Now, in this case, when you do an assignment like X : Message := Create("Steve"); the variavle's type [unconstrained, in this example, becomes constrained in this case to Message(5) (because "Steve" is 5 characters) and so trying to re-assign with a different-sized message-string wouldn't work. (So, while you couldn't say X:= Create("Why") you can say X:= Create("Hello") because the discriminant [Length] here is 5.) -- So, in that manner discriminants can act like constant fields in some cases.
The limited keyword means that the type doesn't have an assignment [but does have initialization], so you could make the entire type behave as a constant; this is different than having the one component be constant though, certainly not as subtle as the distinction between T and T'Class (T'Class is the Type T and all types derived therefrom, where as T is only that type.)

Answer 3

You almost have the general solution (for cases when it can't be a discriminant) already. The type is limited private. Clients of the package can only modify it through the operations the pkg provides. As long as the operations don't modify the field in question, you have what you want (unless I misunderstood and the question is how to prevent yourself from modifying the field in the pkg body).