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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,677963b1aa23e668 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!feeder.news-service.com!news.albasani.net!news.gnuher.de!news.enyo.de!not-for-mail From: Florian Weimer Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: What's stopping you from using Ada for your next commercial project? Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:11:47 +0100 Message-ID: <871v29zfd8.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> References: <4d78867e$0$23760$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> <87r5afv0qa.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: ruchba.enyo.de 1300129907 10645 172.17.135.6 (14 Mar 2011 19:11:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@enyo.de Cancel-Lock: sha1:ebGw23b/B7vzYxrlwhwg1p+hdQI= Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:19158 Date: 2011-03-14T20:11:47+01:00 List-Id: * Ludovic Brenta: > Things are not as bleak as Maciej makes them seem; by his own admission, > most of the bugs he encountered were with interfaces. The system I work > on consists of 1.5 million lines of Ada and has been in existence for > almost 20 years. I would not say we spend 50% of our time reporting and > working around compiler bugs; the real figure is probably 1% for us, > below noise level. That's probably because we don't use interfaces :) If you're in the industry and have received professional training, you're following the beaten path, sticking to what is known to work. (Nothing wrong with that, up to a degree.) I have never received any formal Ada training, and I share Maciej's experience to some extent. This goes back years, to the pre-Ada-2005 days---I once found a bug in GNAT's implementation of scalar out parameters. When I ported my application to Ada 2005 (some porting was required because I used limited return types, even in a way which was completely correct and safe in Ada 95), I (re)discovered a fair number of bugs, including wrong code generation without even using Ada 2005 features. For me, Ada and GNAT are pretty unusual in this regard; I do not experience this phenomenon in other programming environments. But Ada 95 was one of the few languages where I felt up to the task of deciding whether any given program was correctly compiled or not. With other languages, I tend to keep tinkering until things work in some way.