Re: Customer balks at Ada -- any hope?

[Kieran Mckey <kieran.mckey@baesystems.com>]

Ken Garlington wrote:
> 
> "fdebruin" <fdebruin@xs4.xs4all.nl> wrote in message
> news:8l40kb$7na$1@xs4.xs4all.nl...
> > Kieran Mckey <kieran.mckey@baesystems.com> writes:
> >
> > >compiler switches. You should design the system so that the code will
> > >meet performance requirements regardless of whether run-time checks are
> > >enabled or not.
> > >
> > Sometimes, you don't have that luxury.
> >

That is very true Frank, I've been on projects where RTC was turned off
to meet performance targets. All I am saying is that IMHO this is poor
engineering practice and the issue should be considered during initial
system design. 

> 
> Don't forget another aspect of run-time checks that is particularly
> important to embedded systems: Run-time checks are completely worthless...
> unless you have a proper course of action to take when they occur.
> 

That is right. A proper course of action may be just logging the event
in a non-volatile store (admittedly not much use when this blows up !)
or you could attempt some error recovery. Personally, I think Ada could
be better in the area of exception handling, it still being a rather
crude Goto at the moment, is there no way of informing the caller that
an exception has occurred in the sub-program except to re-raise the
exception ?

Kieran Mckey