Re: Ada (was Rival JSF teams fly final STOVL flights with flair, highlight strengths)

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

C may be a gold-plated portable assembly language, but I don't think its
quite as wonderful as Ada is for low-level interaction with the hardware. To
illustrate - try building a struct in which you can control the
representation as exactly as you can build an Ada record for the same job. C
leaves too many "implementation defined" behaviors and/or simply doesn't
give you control over representation. It ends up a lot easier in Ada. And
for all of C's bit-twiddling capabilities (shifting, and/or ops, etc.) Ada
has exact parallels, so I just don't see it as having an advantage. (And
I've written low-level stuff in both languages, so I don't think there is
any lack of experience with either one coloring my judgement.)

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/


"Emmanuel Gustin" <Emmanuel.Gustin@skynet.be> wrote in message
news:9krue8$5v03n$1@ID-52877.news.dfncis.de...
>
> The best excuse for using C/C++ is that, as C is basically
> a gold-plated assembler, it is convenient for implementing
> low-level interactions with hardware. But for a large and
> mission-critical application it too unsafe. You never know
> *for sure* that it isn't going to set its pointers to the wrong
> address and crash the entire environment. And the aircraft
> with it.
>