Re: meaningfully/compellingly "advertising" Ada on StackOverflow

[John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu>]

On Friday, May 18, 2018 at 10:39:14 AM UTC-5, John Perry wrote:
> On Thursday, May 17, 2018 at 11:38:53 PM UTC-5, Paul Rubin wrote:
> > John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu> writes:
> > > I'm curious: did my implementation circumvent safety features?
> > 
> > Were there any unchecked array accesses or anything like that?  If not,
> > that's a big help.
> 
> No arrays at all; it's just linked lists. It's dangerous inasmuch as pointers are dangerous, but I know from experience that Ada has certain rules to prevent pointer dangling.

I want to update on this. I can see two places where I might have circumvented safety features (besides using pointers/access types).

1) There are unchecked deallocations. This is one thing where I'm not too clear on: should one be doing this? The impression I had from what I've seen in Barnes' book is that one should not; apparently Ada is supposed to take care of this by itself, although it doesn't "garbage collect," either. I don't quite understand this -- does it have to do with the custom memory pools?

2) The instruction have the -gnatp option, which I think disables some checks. I used that at one point to see if it would speed up the code, and I thought it did, but I think it actually didn't in the end. So that could be removed; I actually tried experimenting with various pragmas to improve timing, without success.