Safety and Ada (was Re: Ada and Automotive Industry)

Safety and Ada (was Re: Ada and Automotive Industry)

[Robert Dewar]

hris says

  One only has to look at the header: merv.cs.nyu.edu an educationalist
  who designs languages? An Ivory Tower on and Ivory Tower?
  You have no idea who you are arguing with.

Ah, well that brightens up the day :-)
I guess we can only advise Chris to reread the last
line of his post, quoted above. I don't mind at all if people want to argue
with my technical views, but the above is a dastardly and undeserved attack
on the ivory towers of academia, which can hardly be blamed for my
ideas on real world software :-)

One of these days, we will have to set up our own news feed at gnat.com,
so that Chris does not get so easily mislead!

To turn to actual substance in what Chris says:

  > c) this also includes questions about the language whose answer should
  >     be clear to anyone who understands the language. No one can
  >guarantee that everyone understands what they should, but all questions
  >get logged, even silly ones.

  Your Item "c" shows aragance beyond belife. "whose answer should be
  clear to anyone who understands the language".  Obviously the
  description specification was not clear. If any *one* person can make
  the mistake so can another, meaning that in implimentation the result
  may not be the same. OR do you mean that any one who does not understand
  the language the same way you do? When is a silly bug a safe one?

No, that's confused. The formal definition of the language is by NO MEANS
intended to be accessible to everyone. Even quite skilled programmers, if
they have no experience in formal language definition will have a heck of
a time understanding everything in the RM. I would guess that Chris has
very little experience in reading language standards and formal definitions
of languages, or he would know this.

If I counted on all my programmers to learn the language only from the
standard, I would not feel safe with Fortran, C, C++, COBOL, Ada or
anything else. Language standards are NOT meant to be the source from
which you learn a language. I have learned some languages (e.g. COBOL)
from the standard, but I have been involved in language design for a long
time, and it is not something that I would expect or recommend.

For example, no one should try to learn C from the ANSI C standard, or
C++ from the draft ISO standard. You need to build up a considerable
level of knowledge in these languages before the standard becomes a
useful reference document.

The fact that people have trouble reading the standard in no way reflects
on its accuracy or usability, since the point of a standard is to be
understood by the tool builders, trainers and text book writers. 

So I don't think you can regard this as "aragance beyond belife", it is
a fact of life that if you try to write a precise definition of a
programming language, it will not be accessible to most people, although
sections of it will be helpful as a reference source to may programmers
once they have a reasonable level of knowledge.

P.S. I note in your reply no mention of your uncritical acceptance of the
figure 2000, is it perhaps only in academia that the difference between
2000 and 200 is considered significant :-)