Re: Ada The Best Language?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Oh, you'll pay - just not with CPU cycles. :-) Consider it this way: Its
better to have the checks there by default (and by virtue of the language -
not by virtue of someone being "nice" and checking manually) and removing
them from the small percentage of code that may be performance critical (via
pragma Supress) than to have them NOT there by default (and requiring that
the programmers "roll their own", rather than have them by virtue of the
language) and try to intersperse them in the code as you start discovering
you have mysterious errors.

I can't even begin to tell you how often my hide has been saved by having
compiletime & runtime checks in place in Ada that exposed eggregious errors
that would have been very hard to track down without them. When I wear the
embedded/realtime hat, I understand the desirability of getting rid of the
checks (in some cases) but I'm glad they are there for me to decide to get
rid of rather than have to insert them myself *after* I start discovering
problems.

Now if C++ had some sort of compile-time switch that could be thrown that
said "Insert Checks", and the language actually had syntax/semantics that
provided information to check (ranges on numbers, array constraints, etc.)
then I'd think that C++ and Ada were at least equivalent in this area.
However, since there aren't any activatable checks and the language doesn't
provide nearly as much safety information anyway, I find this a major
liability.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Bertrand Augereau" <baugereau@ifrance.kom> wrote in message
news:9j9s3t$kn8$1@wanadoo.fr...
> > The best features of C++ still leave numerous faults in the final
product:
> >
> >   - No overflow checks
> >   - In some cases, no divide by zero checks (this feature may need to be
> >     enabled on your platform).
>
> "You don't have to pay for what you don't use" is the principle.