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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,2e11aa5522d5cc28 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: gwinn@res.ray.com (Joe Gwinn) Subject: Re: Mixing Ada and C++. Is a good idea? Date: 1997/11/20 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 291122409 References: <345F7489.A10@si.ehu.es> Organization: Raytheon Electronic Systems Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-11-20T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote: > < 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