Re: Joint Strike Fighter

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

This seems to be a very common misconception about Ada that tends to come
from C/C++ programmers approaching the language for the first time. Clearly,
many programmers are simply used to having to do something explicit to get
pass-by-reference and think it won't happen unless they make it so.  I have
encountered this misconception often when teaching Ada. I don't know what
could be done with teaching materials, reference documents or the language
itself to make it more clear that the compiler will handle this for you and
won't do something stupid. It just seems to occur over and over again and
Ada gets a bad name over something that is just being misunderstood.

It would be good to have something about this in the FAQ.

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/


"Matthew Heaney" <mheaney@on2.com> wrote in message
news:u0cpfi8hvh7jca@corp.supernews.com...
>
> I wanted to mention that the speaker at this session seemed not to realize
> that tagged types in Ada95 are automatically passed by reference.  He
seemed
> to think that tagged types were passed by value, and that steps would need
> to be taken by the programmer to prevent this.
>
> What they were doing on the project as a "fix" was to pass tagged objects
by
> reference explicitly, using named access types.  But this caused problems
> wrt accessibility rules.  But none of this was necessary, because tagged
> types are automatically passed by reference in Ada95.
>
> Limited types whose full view is limited are also passed by reference.
>
>
>
>