Re: Warning: Flame Bait

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

Bob Duff says

"Note also that many of the issues we're talking about have nothing to do
with particular machines.  For example, order of parameter evaluation.
Ada says "arbitrary order", in the hopes that compilers can generate
more efficient code.  Java says "left to right", putting portability
ahead of efficiency.  Maybe the Java designers would argue that the
efficiency hit is small, or maybe they would argue that portability is
essential, and efficiency less important."


And of course the argument on the other side is that, especially in Ada
which is not full of nasty side effect operators like ++, only very
peculiar code would ever notice the difference, and it seems a shame
to take an efficiency hit to promote portability of code that should
never be written in the first place!

In fact the Ada rule encourages maintainable code by clearly declaring
that weird dependence on side effects is unacceptable. Making badly
written non-maintainable code portable is NOT an Ada design priority.