Re: Microsoft & Ada

[nabbasi@earthlink.net.NOSPAM]

>In a recent posting to comp.lang.ada Markus Kuhn wrote:
>> I asked Microsoft something similar in 1990 at CeBIT, a big German
>> computer fair. Same response. They probably should read in the
>> 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.

it is not only safety problems with C++, it is literally having the
same code, behave differently on different platforms !

I am involved in porting some C++ application. on the Mac, a different
function was being called, as compared with the application
when compiled under Sun Solaris C++ compiler.

the c++ code makes heavy use of inheritance and virtual functions and
function overriding, with heavy use of user defined operators. it is very
hard by just looking at the code to really know how many temporary 
variables will be created, and which function will be called. This
one bug took 5 hours to find, where 2 different function where called
depending on the platform and how the compiler decided to generate the code.

and I do not want to even mention the casting headaches...

when I write C++ code, I'll stick to simple features of C++ becuase I 
really prefer to write software instead of just wasting time debugging 
weired language features.

given all that, the industry still wants to code in C++, so let 
them have it. it is their money after all. If a company is smart enough
to use Ada and find they can build software faster and with less bugs, then
let them do that and let them produce better software and compete with
the others who are using C++. The market now seem to be moving away from
C++ to Java. so lets see if Java does a better job at producing better
quality software. If Java does not make it, what language will jump in 
to take its place? Ada05 ?  

Nasser