Re: Faulty languages and Liability

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

Well, there's certainly a lot of good reasons to learn about and understand
"foreign" languages. While I've been an Ada programmer for a long time, I am
currently employed doing C and C++ and in the past have used a variety of
fairly obscure languages such as Jovial for production work. There's much to
be learned, even if your favorite language doesn't change.

I don't personally have any problem with C/C++ bashing so long as the
criticisms are fair and that one always remembers that there are good
reasons - often beyond the technical - why other languages are used. But its
nice to have you here to defend C++, so keep it up. (Otherwise, where's the
sport in it? :-)

As for automatic template instantiations, I know enough about them to see
that they have potential problems to cause things to happen behind one's
back - which is one of the common complaints here about C/C++ in general.
(Type conversions go on without one's knowledge & consent being a common
source of errors.) However, I can see your point about how it would make
unit conversions less painful. Call it a difference in priorities. Ada wants
to be sure that nothing happens without the programmer having deliberately
decided to do it. Good for safety - bad for convenience. (automatic
instantiation might have made I/O in Ada a whole lot less painful!) C++
gives you convenience - but you sacrifice safety & can start asking for some
really hard to detect bugs. (Probably it creates testing difficulties as
well if you have really stringent test requirements.)Which is better? It
depends on what's important to you. I'd obviously opt for Ada because over
the years, I've grown to appreciate the safety & bug reduction
characteristics.

Anyway, I'm glad I understand what brings you here. Maybe we'll succeed in
making a convert out of you. :-) At least there's likely to be a "Don't
dismiss Ada so casually..." voice in the C++ community.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:3D0EC296.8070504@mail.com...
>
> I consider myself somewhat of a programming language hobbyist.
> I hang out here (as well as on comp.std.c++ and comp.lang.c++.moderated)
> because I find the level of discourse, and of the participants, to be high
> (yourself included). I don't dislike Ada at all, and I find it
entertaining
> to defend C++ against unfair claims here, as well as to post "Ada does it
> much better this way" on the C++ groups.
>
> There's also a certain amount of silver bulletness here that's fun to
> puncture :-)
>
> I find it very instructive, as I learn more about Ada, to try to figure
> out the essential differences between Ada and C++ and how those
differences
> affect the expressiveness of the language. For example, I recently had an
> epiphany regarding the difference between Ada's explicit generic
instantiations
> and C++'s automatic template instantiations. It's why you can't do units
easily
> in Ada, and why local variables can't be template parameters in C++.
>
> And as C++ moves to adopt concurrent programming (which is almost certain
to
> happen in the next revision), I'm hoping (and urging) that the people
involved
> understand how Ada does it, so we don't wind up with a stupid hodgepodge.
That
> doesn't mean that it should look the same in C++, but they should
understand
> why certain decisions were made.
>