From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,9ce095aba33fe8d0 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news4.google.com!news.glorb.com!solnet.ch!solnet.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!switch.ch!cernne03.cern.ch!cern.ch!news From: Maciej Sobczak Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Negative float problem Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 10:51:44 +0100 Organization: CERN - European Laboratory for Particle Physics Message-ID: References: <1130351574.313991.229420@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <10mspnley7gzu$.1swtj67sv0ldr$.dlg@40tude.net> <38tcpxwxfigo$.18ysjyp9ml92c$.dlg@40tude.net> <2ybc7t4au7g$.166dxwfrds1so$.dlg@40tude.net> <18nrnlg9zzl5a.k8rl3ajwauqi.dlg@40tude.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: abpc10883.cern.ch Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: sunnews.cern.ch 1131011503 26067 (None) 137.138.37.241 X-Complaints-To: news@sunnews.cern.ch User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Red Hat/1.7.12-1.1.3.2.SL3 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6138 Date: 2005-11-03T10:51:44+01:00 List-Id: Hi, Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote: > Since you are new to Ada, there is something that you must understand. [...] > There is no space for "sometimes", "maybe", "depends", and > other things like that that are common in other languages. I understand what you wanted to say but I don't share the sentiment that is behind the way you worded it. Example: I'm writing a library subroutine and in this subroutine I raise an exception. Question: can I be sure that the exception will be handled? In other words: can I be sure that not handling of this exception will be detected by the language run-time and reported as error? Answer: *sometimes* yes, but *sometimes* no - it *depends* and *maybe* the exception will be quitely lost without anybody noticing it. What's the problem in the above? The problem is that there are two language features - exceptions and tasking - and that they can *interact*. It is not trivial to come up with correct scheme for this interaction and if you ask two experts you will get three different opinions on the issue. The same is with ADL and packages, namespaces, private/public view, etc. - these are things that can *interact* and you have to use some conditional wording in order to define this interaction. This is true *everywhere* where two features interact. I'm glad that ADL triggered some discussion here, because I learned something in the meantime - that's my objective for lurking here, after all. But please don't use words like "maybe" in order to make the idea look unserious or not Ada-worthy, or in order to make other languages look inferior, because it simply does not hold water. Imagine some Ada programmer decided to learn C++. He comes to the C++ newsgroup, asks a couple of why this or that and I give him this answer: "You are new to C++, so you must understand something: exceptions are *never* quietly lost. There is no place for "sometimes", "maybe" or "depends", as in other languages (that you already know). C++ will protect you." Would it help him? No. (in fact, this kind of mentoring attitute can raise the psychological entry barrier) Would it move anything forward? No. Does it hold water? No. So let's not do this. -- Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/ Programming : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/