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

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

It isn't even new with Ada. Pascal was doing this long before Ada was
invented. IIRC, some Fortran compilers would generate runtime exceptions on
an array index out of bounds. It was one of those things left out of C
because C was supposed to be a high-level assembly language. "You want
checks? Put them in yourself!"

Most of the kinds of checking that Ada does are not particularly new.
Language designers have been putting in compile & runtime checks on all
kinds of things for years. Its really just a difference in mentality. The C
mindset being "Don't burden the code with anything that doesn't need to be
there so we get maximum possible efficiency". Maybe at one time that made
some sense, but with the speed of today's processors and in most application
arenas it really doesn't make much sense. The small percentage of CPU used
for runtime checks just doesn't show up above the noise level. (Of course
there are still some apps for which it *does* make sense, and that's why Ada
lets you disable the checks as you need to.)

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/


"Robert*@" <Robert_member@newsguy.com> wrote in message
news:9r2f090nu2@drn.newsguy.com...
>
> When Java came out, everyone was so excited about it, and how much more
> reliable it was, more than C, and the most common thing sited was that
> it detected array overrun conditions are run-time, wow! as if this was a
> new concept, and Ada had that for 15 years before Java was born.
>
> Yes, Ada does even more today than Java/C/C++. None of those other
languages
> for example will detect a floating point overflow/underflow at run-time,
but
> Ada will.
>