Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

["Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com>]

Pascal Obry wrote:
> "Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com> writes:
>
> > Your claim of fewer bugs is just the sort of unsupported anti-C
> > comment we see all the time.
>
> Just plain wrong, there is data (a PHD) see
> http://www.adaic.com/whyada/ada-vs-c/cada_art.html

Perhaps you should reread this, paying paritcular attention to the
dates involved. According to the paper, they started switching from C
to Ada around 1986. C wasn't standardized until 1989, and (as you'd
expect) it was some time after that before most compilers implemented
the standard language.

By 1990 or so when compilers conforming reasonably closely with the C
standard became available, it appears likely that essentially all new
development was being done in Ada. Under the circumstances, it would be
rather surprising if the C code was ever rewritten into standard C.

In short, this is not a comparison to the C language as it exists
today, or has existed in well over a decade.

He also mentions C++ in passing, but (again, based on the timing) he
was clearly looking at C++ when it was still in an embryonic stage.
Worse, the understanding and use of the language were, if anything,
well behind the development of the language itself. The language itself
was clearly inferior to todays, but it's use was inferior by an even
larger margin.

If anything, based on my own experience with standard C vs.
pre-standard C, I'd say his study shows rather the opposite of what you
think it does. Standard C was enough of an improvement over
pre-standard C that it would be rather surprising if standard C didn't
beat Ada in most areas studied (the primary exception being code
reuse).

It's true that Ada has also been updated in the meantime, but the
changes in Ada have been _drastically_ smaller than those in C or C++.
Ada 83 already had generics, already had type-checking on the same
general order as that introduced into C with function prototypes, etc.
With Ada 95 you can probably expect a fairly substantialy improvement
in reuse, but only rather minor improvements elsewhere.

By contrast, comparing modern C++ to the pre-standard C shows _large_
improvements in nearly all areas. This is due in part to the changes in
the language itself, but perhaps even more so to improved understanding
of how to use the language.

--
    Later,
    Jerry.

The universe is a figment of its own imagination.