From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: *** X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, RATWARE_MS_HASH,RATWARE_OUTLOOK_NONAME autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,9a586954b11ae008 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Nick Roberts" Subject: Re: What Happened While I Wasn't Looking? Date: 1997/04/05 Message-ID: <01bc4158$0af224a0$2dfb82c1@xhv46.dial.pipex.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 230909419 References: <1997Apr2.202514.1843@nosc.mil> Organization: UUNet PIPEX server (post doesn't reflect views of UUNet PIPEX) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-04-05T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert A Duff wrote in article 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.