Re: Have you ever had a bug caused by...

[Robert*@ <Robert_member@newsguy.com>]

For me, the most impressive thing about Ada development environemnt is this:

It is so hard to build an inconsistant program.

In the world of C/C++ and even Java, this problem is so common. Makefiles
are used to try to prevent this, but for anything more complex than a 
simple project, very few programmers know enough about Makefiles to
get all the dependencies done right.  gnatmake does all this work for
you.

In Java, there is also a problem there. You could develop a program 
with class A. But at run time, an older, or newer class A could be loaded
and used if it happened to be on different classpath, or a duplicate
such class exist at run time in another jar file, and few more such
conditions.

In C/C++, one could modify a header file, but not compile one source file
that depends on it, ending up with a program that is not build correctly.

So, for me, this one of the strongest points of Ada, if not the strongest 
point. Interesting that not much weight is given to this advantage of Ada
over many other development environments.

(btw, I have discovered in the official Sun packages, a number of 
duplicated java classes in different places, and those classes are out
of date from each others, ie. same class name, but different bytecode,
so depending on the classpath ordering, one could use a different 
class 'version' that what they expect.)