Re: Bye-bye Ada ? (Ada95 Wholesale Changes?)

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Beard, Frank Randolph CIV wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Warren W. Gay VE3WWG [mailto:ve3wwg@cogeco.ca]
>>CURIOUSITY POLL?
>>
>>I'd be interested if anyone actually uses this type of
>>procedure in more "critical" application development roles.
>>I am sure that others must take advantage of this, if not
>>secretly so? ;-)  Is this type of thing frowned upon by
>>DOD projects, or do they even know this type of thing
>>happens? Just curious.
> 
> 
> I don't know how "critical" you mean, but I've used this
> feature of Ada on a number of occasions which stemmed 
> multiple projects from running the on ground test chambers 
> for the Space Shuttle group, to the onboard Space Station
> data storage and retrieval component, to a Naval 
> communications project.
> 
> Even though our tools usually give us the capability to
> see a callers graph, it is still more useful to prototype
> changes in the spec and have the compiler reliably show me
> the immediate impacts of the changes.  And once the changes
> made it to fruition, they required very little debugging.
> 
> I don't think I've ever openly shared this information even
> with fellow Ada developers, but it sure does make things
> easier.
> 
> Frank

I appreciate the comments you and others have made to this
informal "curiosity poll". This confirms the general usefulness
of the Ada compiler in this role. I think this goes a long
way to creating good "APIs", since the programmer is much
more inclined to make sweeping changes if it is seen as
beneficial.

The responses also seem to highlight the fact that C++
programmers think their compiler is doing a
good job of this. I know from personal experience that it
can only be helpful in obvious changes (like adding an
argument to a call). But in my opinion, experienced Ada
programmers are more "enlightened" on this point.

All of the posts were very "interesting". ;-)

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg