Re: What is wrong with Ada?

["Chad R. Meiners" <chad.rmeiners@gmail.com>]

On Apr 10, 12:12 pm, Jean-Pierre Rosen <r...@adalog.fr> wrote:
> Markus E Leypold a écrit :> Pascal Obry <pas...@obry.net> writes:
>
> >> Markus,
>
> >>>> Why do they like unreadable code?
> >>>> Why do they like to play with a debugger ?
> >>> Good question. That "real Ada software engineers" (like "real men")
> >>> never need a debugger might be the reason why gdb is so badly
> >>> integrated with Gnat. That's a thought.
> >> gdb is used with Ada just not so often.
>
> > Right. But when it is used, it is sorely needed, since this then is
> > one of the conceptual bugs I mentioned.
>
> Sorry, but I beg to disagree here. Conceptual bugs are found by
> reasonning on the source, not with a debugger. Every now and then you
> may need to check the value of a variable at some point in execution to
> validate or invalidate an hypothesis, but even there, I find a proper
> trace message much faster and more precise than using a debugger.
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>             J-P. Rosen (r...@adalog.fr)
> Visit Adalog's web site athttp://www.adalog.fr


I disagree. Sometimes trace messages add line noise and maintaince
requirements to the code base, and it is much easier to trace through
the algorithm step by step (using conditional breaks when necessary).
It is particularly handy to use a debugger when interfacing to other
people's component libraries.  That being said, trace messages are
usually very efficient too.

cavat: I have found debuggers more useful in languages like C++ than
Ada, but then again Visual Studios has an excellent debugger.