Re: Safe C++

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Richard Riehle wrote:
> There is an interesting discussion on comp.lang.c++.moderated
> in which the topic of a safe C++ is being argued.   Some Ada
> enthusiasts might find it amusing.   A couple of posters even
> suggested that, instead of trying to make C++ safe, perhaps they
> needed a new language design to satisfy the need.   Apparently,
> they never heard of Ada.

Rather than just snipe from the side at people trying to do better, take
a look at

	http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/cyclone/

and consider that it certainly has some features which are arguably better
than the Ada alternatives.

Putting my "Ada fan" hat on, I'd say that some of the work on region based
memory management should find it's way into some Ada dialect, maybe even
into the standard. And I really think pattern matching and some other
features of modern (read HM-typed, functional/declarative) languages
should find their way into an Ada successor. If only the Cyclone guys had
started with Ada, or even the SPARK subset!

It's really unfortunate that Ada hasn't spawned lots of research
dialects, like C family languages have.

-- Brian