Re: Ada 83 - avoiding unchecked conversions.

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Darel says

"
In this case, I wouldnt be surprised if the employer had some kind
of 'coding standards' that generally tend to remove alot of
the more useful features of a language , such as unchecked
conversion/deallocation, or compiler pragmas, these documents tend to
be sweeping, and have to be adhered too."


Sure I realize that this happens sometimes, but I like to know when it
is happening, I have no interest in spending my time helping people
recover from their own deliberately idiotic behavior.

Once I heard a presentation from someone talking about AI in C vs Ada.
He announced that C was much more efficient than Ada for this purposes.
Digging into this nonsense claim, we discovered that he was using new
for each allocation in the case of Ada, but in C was not using malloc
for each allocation, but instead had written his own storage allocator
for the C case. There followed the following discussion.

Q. But why aren't you using malloc in C?

A. Much too inefficient, we could not afford the inefficiency!

Q. But then why not do the same thing in Ada?

A. Impossible to do it in Ada!

Q. What are you talking about, of course you can do this using chapter
   13 facilities.

A. We aren't allowed to use anything from chapter 13

Q. Why not?

A. It would result in non-portable code

Q. No less portable than your C code??

A. Our C code is completely portable, we have run it on two different
   machines.

etc. you get the idea :-)