Re: An interesting object lesson (Ada vs C)

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

<<In the C world, "really knows what he is doing" means "knows how to turn
the warnings on".  Do the student a favor and introduce him to lint and
-Wall.
>>

Yes, of course, but the point is that having to rely on warnings for such
very basic type consistency checking is *exactly* the weakness that this
example pointed out (if you think all C compilers come with such warnings,
you have been lucky :-).

Someone else complained at the use of the non-standard long double, true,
but it seems a pity that you *need* a non-standard extension to get at
a basic facility of the underlying architecture -- certainly not something
that is required in Ada!