From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada Date: 1996/03/15 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 142842349 references: <4ic8dk$amh@ra.nrl.navy.mil> organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-03-15T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <4ic8dk$amh@ra.nrl.navy.mil>, Richard Pitre 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