Re: US-MN-Mpls >>> Ada Software Engineers <<<

["Mike Silva" <mjsilva@jps.net>]

Dino Gianisis wrote in message <36C24646.804BC44E@stny.lrun.com>...
>From the previous two posts it seems that Ada is used in commercial
>aviation industry primarily. Why ? What features does it contain that
>give it the edge over lets say C++?....

Being new to Ada myself I wouldn't normally have replied, but Tucker Taft
posted some comments in another thread recently that I found very
informative, so I'll pass them along.  He said:

<begin quote>
It is correct to say that you can now write safe programs
in C++.  But C++ is not a safe language, in that many of the
basic "building blocks" of the language are not safe.  In fact,
because the "defaults" were mostly inherited from C, the "default"
building blocks are almost all unsafe.  For example:

By default in C++ (and C):

   arrays -- no bounds checking
   pointers -- not default initialized, no checking for null when
     dereferenced
   arithmetic -- no overflow checking
   cast -- no checking for inappropriate "narrowing" casts
   "class" parameters -- passed by copy; "chopped" off (run-time
      type identity lost)
   address-of ("&") operation -- no protection from dangling references

In a "safe" language, the defaults (at least) are safe.
There may be escape hatches for certain low-level programming
situations.
<end quote>

Ada's emphasis on safe programming methods, as well as its targeting of
realtime embedded systems (though I should quickly point out that it is a
very general purpose language), are the features that have prompted me to
learn it.

There are a number of Ada sources on the net -- http://www.adahome.com is a
good place to start, and there you will find more Ada advocacy.

Mike