Re: An interesting quote on Java and C++

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

<<>...  But it's clear from the Java language documents that two
>goals of Java are (1) avoid security flaws, and (2) portability
>at the cost of efficiency.
>
>Ada meets neither of those goals.>>



be careful not to compare the reality of Ada with the Sun (and other) hype
on Java. In the current state of things, Java is nowhere NEAR as portable
as Ada, it is almost the normal case that an applet of any complexity
written on one platform is likely not to work on another platform.

As a further indication of the gap between reality and hype, I am corresponding
with a student in Europe who is looking at portability of IEEE floating-point
between compilers for the same language. He wrote to me that "Ada is doing
very well, things seem to be extremly portable between one implementation
and another ........" but  "Java seems a complete mess, I can't get any
of my IEEE fpt examples to port between Java implementations."

And this from a language that supposedly requires IEEE (although this
requirement is the subject of controversy in the ISO standards committee).

Of course you can say, well that's because the implementations are decrepit,
just wait and see, but then we are back to talking about implementatins
and not languages.

As for security, this is a matter of implementation, not the language.
Indeed, there are all kinds of Java restrictions that must be adhered
to for secure applet delivery that are not enforced by Java itself.
And of coruse if you use an Ada->JVM system, then by definition this
has the same level of security, since the security is implemented at
the JVM level, not at the Java level.