Re: Buffer overflow Article - CACM

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 23:12 +0000, robin wrote:


> The point is that Ada code can be compiled direct by a
> PL/I compiler.

Even though it wasn't strictly Ada code, as pointed out,
what's the point? For sure, Ada can compile C statements,
Eiffel statements, and Lisp expressions. And I don't mean
via the standardized Interfaces.* mechanism. Consider

	do
		x.foo(42);
	end;

which language is that? It is both Ada, and Eiffel, and
maybe some more. Though it is not clear that the meaning
of the translated code will be the same in both languages.

	(foo (bar (thr)))

Is this a piece of CommonLISP, or is it C,
Ada, Algol, Pascal, Modula, Oberon, C++, D, PL/1, ...

The point here is that you are trying to praise
your language by showing that there is a
small overlap, mostly syntactically, with some other
language. That doesn't help much in comparing languages,
and how they can help achieving project goals better
than some other languages.

It will be interesting to learn which definitions of
some interesting PL/1 features can be reworked into
the LRM framework of Ada as an improvement, and how,
specifically.