Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <4ic8dk$amh@ra.nrl.navy.mil>,
Richard Pitre <pitre@n5160d.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
>Do you have personal experience of this rough equivalence or is this something  
>whose practical reality should be self evident?

Yes, I have practical experience working on large C programs, and
successfully keeping things consistent using an automatic build tool.
(I hope I correctly understood what you're asking.)  I've also written
such a tool for C, Pascal, Modula-2, and Ada.  The Ada support was
harder then the other three put together.

I admit I have also worked on projects where people weren't so careful
to use the tool, or used a NON-automatic build tool, like Unix 'make'
and hand-written make files.  And that does indeed cause trouble: once
in a while, there's a missing dependency in the make file, and it
causes a run-time bug.  And there are *always* extra dependencies,
which don't cause bugs, but needlessly increase compile time.  (I've
also seen cases where a company ships custom-modified software to a
customer, and fails to remember or save the version that was sent!)

Look, I'm not being anti-Ada.  I wouldn't have spent 3.5 years of my
life helping to design Ada 9X, if I thought C was just as good a tool.
I have *not* experienced C programs that effectively used type
checking, or run-time range checking, or information hiding, etc etc,
to prevent bugs -- lint notwithstanding.  ;-) I just think that this
particular advantage of Ada over C that we're arguing about has been
somewhat exaggerated.  (I didn't deny that it's an advantage, either.)

Somebody (I've lost track of whether it was you or someone else) made
the claim that C programming inherently involves using hand-written
make files.  That's simply not true, and saying it won't convince
anyone that they should use Ada.  At best, you can convince them to
quit using hand-written make files, and use a more automated tool
instead.

- Bob