Re: Improving Ada's image - Was: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Sure it helps. As would runtime checks since they could be used in 
debugging & turned off for production. I'm not saying that Ada wouldn't 
help to produce a better quality OS (or any other program for that 
matter). What I'm saying is that it isn't "Magic". People can do 
sufficient design & testing on C code to get the same reliability 
(albeit at probably greater cost) and the big problems with OS stability 
are typically the kind of things that are not going to get caught by 
language rules. (Like timing of asynchronous events, etc.)

There is a danger with hyping Ada as capable of doing things it can't 
really do. To those who have developed real world apps in other 
languages and managed to get them stable & reliable, Ada enthusiasts 
will look kind of silly claiming that it can only be done in Ada.

In other newsgroups, people have claimed that "Ada isn't well suited to 
OS work..." and their typical response when challenged on this is "Well, 
show me where it *is* used successfully in OS work?" Small scale 
realtime OS's can be found (and yes, that counts) but not much in the 
way of "real" OS's like Linux or Windows. If Ada can really do this (I 
believe it could) and people want to make claims about how superior it 
would be at doing this, then there needs to be some proof by 
demonstration or the claims get dismissed as coming from a bunch of 
idealogues and kooks.

MDC


Brian May wrote:
> 
> Ada does more checks at compile time then some languages. I would
> assume this would benefit an Ada OS, even if all run-time checks are
> turned off.


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