Re: Is C/C++ the future?

[merlin@annwfn.com (Fred McCall)]

In <1994Oct25.234705.26530@sei.cmu.edu> riehler@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu Richard Riehle writes:

>This is not a language problem.  It is an incomplete compiler problem.  If
>a C compiler or an Eiffel compiler or a FORTRAN compiler were correspondingly
>incomplete, there would be a howl of protest throughout the industry.  Only
>Ada compiler vendors could get away with this because they ostensibly met
>the requriement for validation.         

Doesn't this problem (not being able to write 'real' programs, according
to the respondent, without requiring all that machine-specific support)
pretty much shoot the much-vaunted 'portability' of Ada code in the
foot?  It seems to me that this leaves Ada with the same problem that so
many Ada advocates want to 'bash' C/C++ for -- non-portable code is
non-portable (somewhat solipsist, but that seems to be the complaint).

Should the language include platform independent ways of doing most of
those 'platform-specific' things?  It would seem to follow the Ada
philosophy of maximal safety; after all, if pieces of configuration
control are required to be part of the linker, why not define an 'Ada
windows' interface (for example) and then require compilers for
platforms with window support to map their functionality onto the
interface? 



--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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merlin@annwfn.com -- I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.