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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: What is wrong with Ada?
From: "Peter C. Chapin" <pchapin@sover.net>
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Organization: Kelsey Mountain Software
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Date: 12 Apr 2007 10:43:58 GMT
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Date: 2007-04-12T10:43:58+00:00
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"kevin  cline" <kevin.cline@gmail.com> wrote in
news:1176332730.826176.286450@y5g2000hsa.googlegroups.com: 

> You are right about that.  Other engineering disciplines apply
> physical laws to the construction of human artifacts.  There are no
> physical laws governing software.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. For example, it appears that some 
solvable problems are fundamentally intractable (the NP complete problems), 
and others are provably unsolvable in the general case (the undecidable 
problems). There is some kind of structure to computational problems and we 
didn't invent that structure. It is a fact of nature. Software engineers 
have to deal with these inherent properties of the universe to build 
software that solves real world problems. It sounds similar to "ordinary" 
engineering to me.

Peter