Re: Re: What I miss... (really C, Ada, religion)

[weltyrp@rpics.UUCP (Richard Welty)]

brooks@lll-crg.UUCP (Eugene D. Brooks III) writes:
>The only people who like it are those who can't manage to write correct
>programs and need a crutch like subscript checking even in a production
>version of a code.
 
>REAL programmers don't need subscript checking, they write lint free code
>automatically.  Please leave your ADA hype on net.ada where no one is
>bothering to read it!

*flame on*

I am not a big fan of ADA, but the preceeding is a load of garbage.

rule 1:  Large systems have bugs

rule 2:  the more checking the language system does for you, either
         at run time or at compile time, the better off you are

rule 3:  the earlier that the system catches a bug (compile time is
         best), the better ...

Correctness proofs are a nice idea, and worthy of many research
dollars, but are far from being able to deal with the problems
that developers of large systems have today.

While I consider C to be more generally useful than Pascal
(and Ada, at the current time), there things about Pascal that
I miss a great deal ... and every time I find a bug in my C code
that Pascal would have flaged at compile time, I miss Pascal more
(and as a VMS C programmer, I don't have access to lint -- I wish
I did).
-- 
				Rich Welty

	(I am both a part-time grad student at RPI and a full-time
	 employee of a local CAE firm, and opinions expressed herein
	 have nothing to do with anything at all)

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