Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <934kt2$gbh$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  n_brunot@my-deja.com wrote:
> Exact, but in a single direction which is the basic problem
> with dramatic consequences. As you said, this was (lately)
> corrected in Ada95

But there were equivalents of pragma Export in all Ada 83
implementations, so in practice this was not a major problem
in Ada 83. Sure it is nice to make it portable, and that
was the reason this features was standardized in Ada 95.


> > I added that the ONLY portable way to do this was to
> > write an Ada driver that would interface to COBOL and C
> > using the Ada features.
>
> This is one of the portable way. a way is the ONLY way only
> until someone find an other one ...

Nope, it is the ONLY portable way, then and now.

> Java impose the basic type sizes for good reasons ...

This is not relevant. it has to do only with portability of
Java code, not with interfacing Java with other languages.

Furthermore, there are severe performance penalties in the
Java approach, so severe in practice that the normal approach
on the x86, where the fpt rules of Java are a disaster, is
simply to ignore these rules, and do floating-point operations
in a manner that is not comaptible with the Java rules.

> From what I know, they usually deal with big projects, and a
> very small portion of their code consists in pragma import.

Well you don't know enough, and that is false :-)

> I mean comparing with what is done in more usual development
> that is done in C or in Java.

Sounds like you have a rather narrow view, especially if you
lump C and Java together in this respect.

> So they fall completely out the field I was talking about,

No they don't.

> Companies developping products making a very wide use of C
> libraries don't use Ada,

A false generalization, there are many exceptions.



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