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Ada has them, and I guess we all agree on its systems programming nature.


NOOOO!

What Ada (and Rust) calls generics is very different -- it is like template functions in C++.

In those languages the version of the function that is selected is based on the declared type of the arguments.

In CLOS, Dylan, Julia the version of the function that is selected is based on the runtime type of the actual arguments.

Here's an example in Dylan that you can't do in Ada / Rust / C++ / Java.

    define method fib(n) fib(n-1) + fib(n-2) end;
    define method fib(n == 0) 0 end;
    define method fib(n == 1) 1 end;
The `n == 1` is actually syntactic sugar for the type declaration `n :: singleton(1)`.

The Julia version is slightly more complex.

    fib(n) = fib(Val(n))
    fib(::Val{n}) where {n} = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
    fib(::Val{0}) = 0
    fib(::Val{1}) = 1
    
    println(fib(30))
This is perhaps a crazy way to write `fib()` instead of a conventional `if/then/else` or `?:` or switch with a default case, but kinda fun :-)

This of course is just a function with a single argument, but you can do the same thing across multiple arguments.

    define method ack(m, n) ack(m-1, ack(m, n-1)) end;
    define method ack(m == 0, n) n+1 end;
    define method ack(m, n == 0) ack(m-1, 1) end;


You missed the way Ada does OOP, and went completely overboard talking about generics.

As you can see from my comment history, I am quite aware of CLOS, Lisp variants and Dylan.


Last I checked, Ada does not have multimethods/generic functions in the sense of CLOS, Dylan and Julia. It has static function overloading, and single-argument dispatch, just like C++.




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