> which makes no sense, because this is the same code as you had. My suspicion is that there's something magic about declaring classes in packages? Yeah. Disp

> which makes no sense, because this is the same code as you had. My suspicion is that there's something magic about declaring classes in packages? Yeah. Dispatching methods on a type consist of the type's "primitive operations". The Ada 95 Rationale spells it out: "Just as in Ada 83, derived types inherit the operations which "belong" to the parent type - these are called primitive operations in Ada 95. User-written subprograms are classed as primitive operations if they are declared in the same package specification as the type and have the type as parameter or result." It seems like a wart that you're not in an "anonymous" package in situations like your example, but I also guess it probably doesn't come up much in "real" programs.