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From: jsa@alexandria.organon.com (Jon S Anthony)
Subject: Re: Ada and robots
Date: 1997/06/27
Message-ID: <JSA.97Jun27151703@alexandria.organon.com>#1/1
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Distribution: world
References: <9706262213.AA13647@stealth.ctron.com>
Organization: PSI Public Usenet Link
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-06-27T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <9706262213.AA13647@stealth.ctron.com> Huy Vo <vo@CTRON.COM> writes:

> >> You rely on the runtime system telling you what line it fails?
> >
> >No.  All such stuff should be isolated with a non-lowlevel interface.
> >Inside the implementation exception handler(s) take the appropriate
> >action.  Outside, no one cares or needs to care.
> 
> 
> Someone has to care, Jon. Because  if you dynamically  allocate memory
> at 101 places in your 100K lines of code and only one of
> the allocations failed, you really want to know which one failed.

Hardly.  In general, that will not be at all informative.  The problem
will have been caused by a memory _leak_ - for which, who's attempting
final allocation is completely irrelevant.


> As an application programmer what would you do? As a compiler writer
> that has to provide a default handler for this type of situation
> what would you do?
> 
> In C, it's as simple as
> 
>   if (!(cp =malloc(BIG_CHUNK)) {
>     fprintf(stderr, "Buy some more ram, i died at line %d\n", __LINE__);
>     exit(1);
>    }

This is a joke, right?  Anyone I ever see writing god-awful code like
the above would get sent back for some remedial lessons.


> Show me your code.

Equivalent lousy Ada code:

exception
    when E : Storage_Error =>
	Put_Line(
	    Exception_Name(E) & ": " & Exception_Information(E) &
            "In function Parser.Parse_Derived_Type_Def.Array_Type," &
            when attempting to allocate node for anonymous array type." );


/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari