Re: Ada Successor Language

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Thursday, June 28, 2018 at 10:11:59 PM UTC-5, Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Dan'l Miller" writes:
> > bad idea that threatens to bring C++ slicing to Ada
> 
> Are you talking about this?
> 
>    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_slicing

Yes, but the Wikipedia article does not explore every tentacle.

> Does Ada somehow escape from it now?

I personally believe that Ada as currently defined never has had the slicing problem.  (But the Ada luminaries on the ARG would know best.)  This is because the Ada language designers have meticulously rejected language features in the vicinity of that topic to steer clear of it.  E.g., Ada doesn't permit overloading the assignment operator in any way that C++ does.  I suspect that repeatedly rejecting Steelman requirement 3-3F has something to do with it too.

> It does sound bad.

It is.  There are about a half dozen of the big causes of landmines in the landmine-field that is C++.  Slicing is perhaps the most potent/pernicious/silent of those big-6.  Conversely, programming professionally in C++ is like growing up as a child or teenager in a war zone:  you just learn that constant never-ending paranoia about avoiding all possibility of stepping on a landmine every waking moment is a really healthy survival/coping technique.  Still, I'd love to switch entirely over to Ada away from C++, hence why I am always looking for how to get Ada2012 or greater across all the platforms that I work on, especially the remaining ones:  iOS with Cocoa Touch, MacOS with Cocoa, Android via JNI, and soon to be Tizen and FuchsiaOS too.