Re: [Spark] Arrays of Strings

["Phil Thornley" <phil.thornley@baesystems.com>]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:1049986095.779228@master.nyc.kbcfp.com...
> Getting rid of features that are presumed to cause problems is a bit
of
> hubris that language designers always seem to fall victim to. Ada
itself
> had a huge problem because the designers thought that function
pointers
> could be eliminated. Spark gets rid of all pointers, Java gets rid of
> templates, and so on and so on.
>
> Then everyone who uses these languages has to figure out how to work
> around the lack of the feature they need, essentially duplicating it
in
> some kludgy way. [abuse snipped]

There must be very few SPARK based systems that don't have to include
some non-SPARK code. (One whole chapter of the SPARK book is about
interfacing to such code.)

But to argue that this makes languages such as SPARK wholly useless is
specious.

If I am writing the code for a safety-critical system then all of that
code has to be brought to the same integrity level. If 99% of that is
SPARK code then the effort to validate that code is minimised and I am
quite content to put a lot of manual analysis (per line of code) into
bringing the remaining 1% up to the same integrity level.

Phil Thornley

--
Phil Thornley
BAE SYSTEMS