Re: Help me to chose between ADA 95 and C++

[Rakesh Malhotra <rakesh.malhotra@pop.safetran.com>]

Pascal Obry wrote:
> 
> Chris Powell <chris.powell@rrds.co.uk> a �crit dans le message :
> 38566835.B4A2D48@rdel.co.uk...
> > Did the coding standard for the safety-critical software developed allow
> > full use of Ada 95 constructs? My experience of safety-critical software
> > is that while Ada is usually the chosen language, most of the Ada
> > language features are disallowed. I worked on one project where
> > constrained types were not allowed (because they are more likely to
> > raise exceptions than unconstrained types), no packages (because data
> > hiding limited testability) and certainly nothing as difficult to test
> > as inheritance/polymorphism could be used.
>
> No packages, is that a joke ??
[snip]

I don't think that the elimination of packages in safety critical
systems is not a general one.  I have worked on several such systems to,
both, European and US standards and have not come across this
restriction.   Perhaps, eliminating packages was a self imposed
restriction of the team that did the work ?

Certainly, data hiding limits the ability of automatic tools to analyse
the program which is why SPARK requires that you "expose" this data
using SPARK annotations.  However, even with SPARK you can use
packages.    So, again, I am not sure where the above restriction comes
from.

Rakesh