Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Friday, June 8, 2012 2:35:55 PM UTC-7, Jeffrey Carter wrote:

> > 3. How about the quality and availablity of supporting tools like
> > debuggers and profilers?
> 
> One nice thing about Ada is not needing to use a debugger.

I don't get this comment.  Ada is a lot nicer than some languages at preventing you from making certain kinds of mistakes, but no language is able to prevent logic errors and certain dumb typos.  And if you make this kind of error and the program doesn't work, just the fact of its being written in Ada doesn't help you much.  There may less need for a debugger because Ada will prevent certain types of errors and things like constraint checks will catch some others that would cause havoc in C.  But it can't catch everything, and even if it does find an index that's out of range it won't tell you why the index was out of range.  I mean, Ada is a much better language than certain others for writing correct code, but this seems like a gross overstatement.

Or maybe I'm just being parochial here because I designed and wrote the Ada debugger that comes with Irvine Compiler's product.  And yes, I do use it to help track down problems.  (Including errors in the debugger itself.)

                         -- Adam