Re: Ada as a beginning language

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <EMERY.93Mar18203251@dr_no.mitre.org> emery@dr_no.mitre.org (David Emery) writes:
>In a discussion on this with a college professor, I asserted Ada's
>greatest strength is its well-defined error handling.  As much stuff
>as possible is checked at compile-time.  Stuff that isn't checked at
>compile-time (unless erroneous) is caught at run-time with predictable
>behavior (i.e. an exception).  Contract this to C, FORTRAN and Pascal,
>and try to explain to a student what happens when s/he accidentally
>divides by zero...
>				dave

...or tries to write into the 25th element of a 20-element array.

As an exercise, try this with your favorite C compiler. As for Pascal,
we always have to ask "which Pascal?" because the standard for Pascal
does not specify the behavior of such an operation (or much of anything
else). At least with Ada, you are _guaranteed_ that any of the 500-odd
validated compilers will cause your program to raise constraint_error.

This professor agrees with Dave.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"The most important thing is to be sincere, 
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