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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,76da32d8c4934801 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dramirez@cs.uml.edu (Dr Amirez) Subject: Re: Ada --> C Translation, was: Win CE target Date: 1998/10/10 Message-ID: <6vp23h$hc3$1@jupiter.cs.uml.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 399819067 References: <6vobnk$vt9$1@jupiter.cs.uml.edu> X-Complaints-To: abuse@uml.edu X-Trace: ulowell.uml.edu 908069809 24660 129.63.1.6 (11 Oct 1998 01:36:49 GMT) Organization: UMass-Lowell Computer Science NNTP-Posting-Date: 11 Oct 1998 01:36:49 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-10-11T01:36:49+00:00 List-Id: In article dale@cs.rmit.edu.au (Dale Stanbrough) writes: >Dr Amirez wrote: > >" Well, C didn't have exceptions for years and probably will never have it. > That didn't keep it from being one of the most successful languages > ever created. If you consider a feature rich language a better language > then let me tell you this. I remember seeing a question on this forum > that goes like this: "If a task blocks on I/O, do other tasks get a chance > to run or the *process* will suspend itself, and no task will run > until the process get scheduled again? " > Someone responded that it's undefined. Well, I would think such > an important feature should be very well defined instead of being > left as an excercise for the user to find out how that is implemented > on their systems. After all, isn't Ada intended to be a system > programming language? You can't program systems using features that > are system dependant themselves. > The more features a language has, the more flaws it has. You, as an Ada > programmer, probably know better than I". > > > >Ok, let's put your rather simplistic analysis to the test. > >An issue of Communications of the ACM tested a large number of Unix >utilities (vi was one of them) to the test by feeding them with a stream >of randomly produced characters. A very high proportion of the programs >crashed (core dumped!). Well, any software needs testing. Much of this is the fault of UNIX vendors. I understand the bugs got reported times after times but never got fixed. I can only think of one reason: patching one thing will only make another problem emerge. That's sad. But then the time for UNIX has passed, investing into fixing UNIX bugs isn't productive. Then again, how many times does the ACM get a chance to test an OS in Ada? Theoretically such an OS will be better than UNIX/NT/LINUX, but you never know. > >This is from a simple language. Why did this happen? If it is such a >simple language, surely by your logic, any program will be aok? > > >Lets face reality. A language with more features may be harder to >implement. There may be some flaws in the definition. But does it mean >that the language can't be used to create reliable code? Certainly the >opposite (a simple language will always produce good code) isn't true. >What it really means is you have to analyze the features to see if they >help you write better programs. Another recent article in Communications >of the ACM had a discussion about all the terrible things that could >happen in programs (it did a fault analysis of a large number of (C) >programs). Guess what.. a large number of the _run time_ problems in >these programs would have been _compile time_ problems in Ada. How about I hate guessing. I will wait for a an Ada OS to come along. Linux is (used to be anyway ) a one man project. Surely an OS can't be that hard to build. Please leave AT&T out of this. They contribute greatly to the Computer Sci community. Without them I would still be working on some obscure system written in a mixture of FORTRAN, PL1 and assembly.