Re: What Happened While I Wasn't Looking?

["Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com>]

Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote in article
<E82sM5.Gwv@world.std.com> a long and rambling answer to a fairly long and
rambling post in the first place :-) about how Lisp does the right thing
with arithmetic, and how he doesn't want to start a language war. Surely we
are all men of the world? All credit to Lisp for doing the right thing!
Also, this illustrates the difficulties of avoiding sexism: how does one
convert "all men of the world" into a politically correct equivalent?

More to the point, Ada is used to create real-time applications. Like it or
not, this often requires interfacing with the hardware in a pretty dirty
manner. It is wrong, of course, but this is a world of deadlines, and
expediency sometimes has to happen. No-one in business is going to trust a
language which prevents this sort of expediency, no matter how 'ugly' it
may be. So, dislike it as you may (and I can assure you, I do as much as
anyone), Ada just has to allow it. Thus, the RM is right. What would be
wrong would be for any programmer to use the facility when not strictly
necessary.

Nick.