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, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7ea1cb7a2beb2ee X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: Disallowing Pre-Defined Operations Date: 2000/03/23 Message-ID: <8bcalg$pmb$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 601171277 References: <8a9eeg$qtv$1@newpoisson.nosc.mil> <38D2E598.262D1CD5@erols.com> <8b0pbg$aph$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38D9A2E8.F720768@erols.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x22.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Thu Mar 23 05:38:57 2000 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 2000-03-23T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <38D9A2E8.F720768@erols.com>, whitaker@erols.com wrote: > No one asks for built-in units checking. (Actually I did and several > others have talked to me about it, but apparently not to ACT.) This may > not be unexpected. ACT talks to the computer people in a company. > Computer scientists have no brief for units, they deal with bits, and > maybe GUIs. They get an algorithm and are supposed to implement it. Well I can't speak for other vendors, but the above is not anything like recognizable in terms of our customers and how we interact and whom we talk to. We definitely talk to the designers at the top level. It is simply that this requirement has never arisen. In wake of the publicity of the Mars mission, even though this was not a language issue per se, you would think that if anyone was interested in this issue, it would have come up now. Note that the derived types in Ada go quite far in the direction of avoiding junk unintentional mixing of units. What would be interesting is to gather a catalog of instances in which units problems *preventable by the kind of feature being discussed here* have actually occurred and caused trouble. I see a lot of people hypothesizing that this would be a useful feature that would sell Ada, but as we all know in CLA, there is that kind of support for almost any imaginable feature in Ada. What would be more interesting is specific war stories that we could analyze to see how an additional feature might have helped. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.