Re: Ada is almost useless in embedded systems

[ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen)]

In article <4gechc$g26@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>, ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU
(Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: 

|> In defence of Lint, I have to say that all of the things it reports are
|> likely symptoms of serious errors, and that it is next door to impossible
|> to UNINTENTIONALLY ignore the serious errors.  The only way you can ignore
|> the serious errors is by not tracking down all the lint reports to see how
|> serious they are.  A typical experience with someone else's code might be
|>      - 16 000 lines of source code
|>      -  1 000 lines of lint warnings
|>      -     10 hours checking the lint warnings
|>      -     10 days fixing the serious bugs.
|> Many categories of warnings can easily be switched off.
|>
|> There are two real problems with lint.

You mean you don't consider the ten hours checking the lint warnings (let
alone ten days fixing only the "serious" bugs) to be a "real problem"?
Or did I miss your smiley?

|> (1) The declarations of C do not provide enough information for really
|>     effective checking.  (E.g. all integer types are compatible.)

Indeed.

|> (2) There are legions of C programmers who apply lint, if at all, far too
|>     late in the life cycle, after they have already populated their code
|>     with tons of lint.

Not an option with Ada.  You can't get a successful compilation until
your code has been delinted.

--
Norman H. Cohen    ncohen@watson.ibm.com