Re: C bug of the day

[kanze@gabi-soft.fr]

Wesley Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:<fOOdnX15fpHvN3ujXTWcqg@gbronline.com>...
> >>>> I'd rather have a language in which all of the defaults were
> >>>>fundamentally safe, but with the freedom to override them if you
> >>>>had special constraints, or even in cases where you came across a
> >>>>case which the language authors hadn't considered.  I don't know
> >>>>such a language, however; it may exist somewhere, but if it does,
> >>>>it certainly isn't very popular or wide spread.

> > This is even more disappointing coming from the author (James
> > Kanze).  I have had email conversations with him about Ada. He has
> > heard of Ada.  He has never used Ada. He does not understand what he
> > has been told.

> Sounds to me like he knows he's describing Ada and pretending he
> doesn't.

Just to set the record straight, I hadn't seen the cross posting, and
wasn't thinking of Ada at all.

There are a number of languages whose developers have placed safe use as
a very high criteria.  Some of them also allow unsafe practices when
possible.  From what I've read, Modula-3 is my favorite of these, but
Ada is certainly among them (and even Modula-3 has one or two things I
don't like).  While I very much like these languages in theory, I've
never had the occasion to actually use them in a real application.  So I
tend to forget about them.

There are also languages which correct one or two weaknesses of C++, but
also throw out all of its good points, and make work-arounds impossible
in the cases which they got wrong (which are still a lot).  The results
are that even though such languages claim great safety, and do tend to
core dump less often in the hands of a na�ve programmer (but is a wrong
result better than a core dump?), it is very difficult, if not
impossible, for a careful and conscientious programmer to write code to
the level of quality that I usually insist on.  Never the less, some of
these languages have received a great deal of publicity because of their
supposed safety.

I was mainly thinking of this latter group when I wrote my statement.
While I'll stand by my statement that no language is perfect, with
regards to Ada, I'll admit my ignorance, and say that from what I've
read of the language, I'm very favorably impressed.

> Could it be a subtle form of trolling ?

Not intentionally, at any rate.

--
James Kanze             GABI Software             mailto:kanze@gabi-soft.fr
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