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,b0d68c502c0ae6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: Printing Enum Variable Re: Linux World Date: 1999/03/05 Message-ID: <7boqj7$n9b$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 451557229 References: <7bfc2n$jl9@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> <7bhh26$r7c$1@remarQ.com> <36DCAC1F.430E2C5E@aasaa.ofe.org> <7bk5c2$8ge$1@remarQ.com> <36DDA9BA.E005E578@aasaa.ofe.org> <36DE3744.13F6A16A@omicron.se> <36DD54D2.141B@ddre.dk> <7bn19b$7h4$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DE53BC.1AE0@ddre.dk> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x10.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Fri Mar 05 14:43:54 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-03-05T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <36DE53BC.1AE0@ddre.dk>, hm@ddre.dk_nospam wrote: > robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote: > What really amazes me is that even though good people has > spent good time designing a validation procedure where > specific compilers are validated for specific operating > systems, then one of these good people claims that > > 1. this procedure may validate combinations that in his > own words behave annoying and silly and undoubtedly would > be rejected by the marketplace. > > 2. the validation process would seriously broken, if it > were to consider these problems. If this amazes you, it is simply because you have fundamental misunderstandings of what validation is all about. >From one point of view it is amazing to *me* that people still have these kinds of misconceptions, but on the other hand we always have new people who have not been around, and for whom we rerun old discussions :-) :-) Validation has NOTHING to say about whether implementations are usable. Remember that the first validation was of Ada/Ed which was obviously unusable for anything even vaguely serious (David, this was probably before your time, but Ada/Ed was an executable specification that ran perhaps 6-7 decimal orders of magnitude slower than a production compiler). Validation merely measures one thing, whether your implementation understands the semantic and syntactic issues in the language definition, as tested reasonably thoroughly, but of course not fully (no test is complete) by the validation suite. If you use a validated compiler, then you know the implementors understand the language well, which is a good thing, and you are perhaps less likely to find the kind of bugs that involve two different compilers making subtly different interpretations (e.g. a program that is legal on one compiler and illegal on another). Note I say less likely, not impossible! Lots of people have lots of different ideas about what make an Ada 95 compiler usable, here are some examples, some from our customers, some from CLA: 1) performance must be same as compiler xxx 2) COM files must be buildable on NT :-) 3) rep clauses recognized by compiler xxx must work 4) garbage collection is required 5) UTF-8 encoding for wide character is required 6) 256 priority levels are required 7) floating-point overflow checking is required 8) full IEEE semantics for floating-point are required 9) Latin-1 characters must come out "right" on my screen 10) C++ interfacing must work 11) -n32 mode must be supported on SGI 12) loop unrolling must be controllable by a pragma 13) tight packing is required for component size of 42 14) clearer error msg is required for xxx 15) every error msg should have an RM reference 16) 64-bit integer support is required on all machines 17) 64-bit integer support required with no run-time OK, that's enough typing, I have to get back to work, I could easily add another several hundred entries to the list. The point is that NONE of the above issues are even vaguely validation issues. Over time, people have kept making the mistake of assuming that validation ensures usability. In real life it does not even ensure 100% conformance, let alone usability. It is generally the only objective test we have for conformance, so it is common to at least consider it to be a test for conformance, but to get confused with a test for usability or marketability is a definite error! Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own