Re: computer language used to program Mars Lander

[Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net>]

Paul,

> The small memory footprint and VxWorks environment probably makes C a
> very attractive language for the NASA guys.  If they used Ada, they
> would be slower, have much larger memory requirements and have a very
> hard time debugging problems remotely.

That's just good-old-wrong-assumption made by lot of people. Ada is 
slower? I see nothing slow in Ada which is a language. Does a language 
has speed now?

More seriously, some benchmarks have shown that some Ada compiler have 
been generating faster code than C compiler on a given application. And 
of course, some other benchmarks have shown the opposite.

The memory requirement for Ada is wrong too. Using a zero-foot-print 
runtime you have zero memory requirement from the runtime.

>> I suspect its a damn sight easier to prove C correct than C++.

Still lot easier to prove Ada correct. And in any case on critical 
applications there is no Ada nor C but some subset that makes the 
languages safer (e.g. SPARK for Ada or MISRA-C for C).

Please let's try to at least have constructive criticisms.

Thanks.
Pascal.

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--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
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