What is exactly the difference between
type A is access Object'Class;
and
type B is access all Object'Class;
In the RM and Rationale only definitions like B are used. What's the use for A-like definitions ?
(Tucker Taft answers)
The only difference is that A is more restrictive, and so presumably might catch bugs that B would not. A is a "pool-specific" access type, and as such, you cannot convert values of other access types to it, nor can you use 'Access to create values of type A. Values of type A may only point into its "own" pool; that is only to objects created by allocators of type A. This means that unchecked-deallocation is somewhat safer when used with a pool-specific type like A.
B is a "general" access type, and you can allocate in one storage pool, and then convert the access value to type B and store it into a variable of type B. Similarly, values of type B may point at objects declared "aliased."
When using class-wide pointer types, type conversion is sometimes used for "narrowing." This would not in general be possible if you had left out the "all" in the declaration, as in the declaration of A. So, as a general rule, access-to-classwide types usually need to be general access types. However, there is no real harm in starting out with a pool-specific type, and then if you find you need to do a conversion or use 'Access, the compiler should notify you that you need to add the "all" in the declaration of the type. This way you get the added safety of using a pool-specific access type, until you decide explicitly that you need the flexibility of general access types.
In some implementations, pool-specific access types might have a shorter representation, since they only need to be able to point at objects in a single storage pool. As we move toward 64-bit address spaces, this might be a significant issue. I could imagine that pool-specific access types might remain 32-bits in some implementations, while general access types would necessarily be 64-bits.
(Tucker Taft) | 
