Re: Microsoft & Ada

[crt@cfmu.eurocontrol.be (Dirk Craeynest)]

In article <3556719D.32D52430@pipeline.com> Daren Scot Wilson
<darenw@pipeline.com> writes:
>In a recent posting to comp.lang.ada Markus Kuhn wrote:
[...]
>> latest Byte issue the article about the causes for the frequent
>> Windows crashes, where the safety problems of C/C++ are listed
>> as one of the major reasons for the notorious unreliability of
>> applications on Microsoft platforms.
>
>I remember that article.   It was a good one.  Is the text available
>on-line anywhere?

Byte / April 1998 / Cover Story : Crash-Proof Computing 

http://www.byte.com/art/9804/sec5/sec5.htm

    Here's why today's PCs are the most crash-prone computers
    ever built -- and how you can make yours more reliable.
    - by Tom R. Halfhill 

The final paragraph of the paper, in the section

    http://www.byte.com/art/9804/sec5/art7.htm
    Better Tools for Better Code

after heaps of arguments why Java is so much better than "C/C++" [sic],
concludes with:

    Java is by no means the only language to emphasize code safety.
    Eiffel, an object-oriented language developed by Bertrand Meyer in
    1988, goes even further than Java in some ways. Eiffel requires
    methods to expose their calling parameters at run time. Most other
    languages, including Java and C/C++, rely on documentation for this
    purpose. Ada, a 1970s language developed for the U.S. Department
    of Defense, contains similar safeguards. But Java is the newest
    language to win broad support from tool vendors, developers, OS
    vendors, and schools. 

"Ada, a 1970s language developed for the U.S. DoD" is clearly not "new"
enough to be considered interesting.

Sigh...

Dirk (Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.ac.be for Ada-Belgium e-mail)

*** June 8-12, Intl. Conference on Reliable Software Technologies
*** - Ada-Europe'98, Uppsala, Sweden, http://www.ada-europe.org/

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