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From: weltyrp@rpics.UUCP (Richard Welty)
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Re: What I miss... (really C, Ada, religion)
Message-ID: <196@rpics.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 20-Oct-85 22:26:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: rpics.196
Posted: Sun Oct 20 22:26:01 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 22-Oct-85 05:25:01 EDT
References: <796@kuling.UUCP> <2580002@csd2.UUCP>
Organization: RPI CS Department, Troy  NY
Xref: watmath net.arch:1930 net.lang.ada:428
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

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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