Re: Papers on the Ariane-5 crash and Design by Contract

[William Clodius <wclodius@lanl.gov>]

Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> It was important to note as an aside, as we did, that Ada's exception
> mechanism IS subject to criticism (many people have criticized it
> thoroughly, including Tony Hoare in his Turing Award lecture), but that
> this was NOT the point here since Ada's exception mechanism, in spite
> of its deficiencies, COULD have been used to avoid the error.

I hope I am correct in my memory, but I believe Tony Hoare's criticism
of Ada's exception handling mechanism in this context is sufficiently
general in its comments to apply to any modern exception handling
mechanisms including those of Ada, C++, and Eiffel. He was largely
concerned with the difficulty of correctly implementing this construct
(and other aspects of Ada), and those aspects of Ada's mechanism that
cause implementation difficulty are shared by the mechanisms of the
other languages.

> <snip>

-- 

William B. Clodius		Phone: (505)-665-9370
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