Re: Safe C++

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

On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Chad Robert Meiners wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Brian Rogoff wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Which features are better than the Ada alternatives?
                    ^-- arguably

Pattern matching
Parametrically polymorphic functions
Tuples

I think region based memory management is a win too, and could probably be
fit onto Ada without too much disruption.

> Cyclone doesn't appear to help reduce the number of pointers that the
> programmer has to manage which I consider to be a major drawback with the
> language.

Ada has advantages here, no doubt, but Cyclone makes the manipulations
much safer than C or C++. It's hardly fair to compare the unsafety of
Cyclone pointers with raw C!

As much as I prefer Ada to C, it's clear that some of these Safer C/C++
variants, especially ones which don't try to follow C++ too much, have a
lot to offer. Ada advocates can start seeming awfully provincial, with
their allergies to anything smacking of C.

Now, if you were to complain that Cyclone is another one of these
miserable flat languages without nested function definitions, I'd cheer
you on. :-)

-- Brian


> > 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
> >
> >
> >
> - Chad R. Meiners
>
>