Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story

["Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:57:01 GMT, <adaworks@sbcglobal.net> declaimed the
> following in comp.lang.ada:
> 
>>One of my early mentors in Ada, Doug Bryan, once said, "Until
> 
> 	Now there is a name I haven't heard in 17 years... If it's the same
> Doug Bryan, he was a member of a gaming group I was in...

An Ada seminar run by Doug that I attended quite some time ago continues 
to exert a profound influence on my Ada programming practice and 
undestanding.  In that seminar he focused on Ada's "type model" and how 
that was the foundation of the language's definition.  The proper 
definition of types embeds mountains of useful information about your 
program that can be programmatically extracted by querying the type 
model for that information, which is mostly done via attributes.

That's why I occasionally get on the soapbox that while "strong typing" 
is a strength of Ada, it's only _part_ of the story, the rest is having 
access to information about types and their instances that is being 
implicitly encoded into the software due to Ada's type model based 
definition.

With the fallacious dismissal of strong typing, not only the defensive 
aspects of Ada are being thrown out, but the revelatory ones as well.

-- Marc A. Criley
-- McKae Technologies
-- www.mckae.com
-- DTraq - XPath In Ada - XML EZ Out