From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: ** X-Spam-Status: No, score=2.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d901a50a5adfec3c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1094ba,9f0bf354542633fd X-Google-Attributes: gid1094ba,public From: walt@swcp.com (Walt Brainerd) Subject: Re: Fortran or Ada? Date: 1998/09/24 Message-ID: <6ue7kp$61k@boofura.swcp.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 394499595 Organization: Unicomp, Inc. Followup-To: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.ada Reply-To: walt@fortran.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-09-24T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote: > Well it is certainly a design point of Ada to avoid situations > in which small lexical errors cause major differences in the > meaning of a program, and I think it achieves this goal pretty > well. Certainly better than . . . > > . . . Fortran: > > Do 10 i = 1.6 > > the latter being the (in)famous bug at the heart of the urban > legend that the Venus probe died because of this bug :-) By Fortran, you must mean Fortran 77 because there are three features in Fortran 90/95 that will cause this to be classified as an error: 1. implicit none (causing Do10i to be caught as an undeclared variable) 2. Significant blanks in the free source form (making the statement illegal syntactially) 3. Use of do-end do form instead of those old-fashioned labels (in which case a syntactially illegal do statement will produce an end do with no matching do). BTW, I think Ada is (also) a great language. -- Walt Brainerd walt@fortran.com Unicomp, Inc. +1-520-298-7212 298-7074 (fax) 7660 E. Broadway, Suite 203 +1-500-Fortran (367-8726) Tucson, AZ 85710 USA http://www.fortran.com/fortran