Re: The trouble with Ada... (60 lines)

[utcsri!neat.cs.toronto.edu!tlai@uunet.uu.net (Tony Wen Hsun Lai)]

In article <1992Sep22.172353.23907@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com 
(fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>In <15467@suns4.crosfield.co.uk> pdg@crosfield.co.uk (paul goffin) writes:
[stuff deleted]
>You can 'hack' in any language, and bad code
>can be written in every language.  Convincing yourself that Ada is
>some kind of 'magic bullet' is a good way to produce some bad code. 
>
>>In Ada, those coding errors are quickly exposed by the compiler.
>>Worse, it's actually difficult when using Ada to write any code
>>at all if you don't have a very good idea about the total
>>design.  That means you have to address the "difficult bit" first.
>>(I think that's what Ada was all about!)
>
>Not at all.  You do it wrong just the way you would do it wrong in C;
>divide the problem into sub-parts and then do the easy ones.

But in practice, different languages often suggest different styles or
different approaches to solving problems, so the types of bad code that are
prevalent will be different.  Also, different language communities have
different mentalities; the "superhacker" mentality is presumably harder
to find among Ada programmers than C programmers.  A language isn't
completely responsible for the programmers' mentalities, but it does have
an effect.

>"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
> in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden

Hm.  Do you also mention this to C++ programmers who criticize dynamically
typed languages?  :)

Tony Lai