Re: Mixing Ada and C++. Is a good idea?

[gwinn@res.ray.com (Joe Gwinn)]

In article <dewar.879560344@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:

> <<Yes, and that too is well worth the warning.  When I said you could waste
> project weeks on this, I wasn't talking about something I read about
> somewhere.  The root cause was only discovered by assembly-level debugging
> of generated code after the development team had stalled, their fancy
> source-level debuggers having proved useless.
> >>
> 
> Debuggers are a poor substitute for knowing the languages that you work
> with properly. Sure, I can see how poorly trained programmers could be
> confused about the semantics of sizeof and 'Size, but this is the kind
> of error that good programmers avoid in the first place. How such an
> error could take weeks to find is beyond me. But I guess people can be
> arbitrarily non-productive when they get dragged into the debugger mire.

Well, we don't usually compiler experts for plow-the-fields coding, and
it's an easy mistake to make, especially if one believes that Ada's error
checking will catch all such problems, especially in a large-scale
project.  No matter how careful we are, it always comes down to debugging
at midnight.  We wish it weren't so, but it is so, has always been so, and
probably will always be so.

My gripe is with programmers so ill trained that they cannot debug at the
assembly level, when necessary.  Nobody claimed it was pretty.

Joe Gwinn