Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

"Anonymous Coward" <anonymous@coward.org> wrote in message
news:VeRIf.30362$3V4.15715@trnddc06...
>
> Do you folks encounter this frequently?  And what's the solution?
> Management can never appreciate the benefits of concepts like type
> safety.  Strong typing is incorrectly viewed as "academic" and counter
> to progress.
>
I was at an Ada conference many years ago, before the end of the
mandate, and visiting the booth of a well-known CASE tool
publisher.   They began to demonstrate the tool for me.

At one point the person doing the demonstration said something
such as, "Well let's get rid of these limited private types since they
cannot be used for anything useful."   He then continued with his
demonstration of the tool.

I was horrified, but decided to remain polite.   It would have been
no good to try to educate him to the contrary.

From an engineering perspective (although not from a programmer's
point-of-view) it is quite valuable that we cannot overload the
assignment operation and do other little things that are easy in
languages without the equivalent of limited private.   Yes, to do
assignment on a limited type we must create a procedure, but that
is not a bad thing -- it is a good thing.

One of my early mentors in Ada, Doug Bryan, once said, "Until
you understand 'limited' you don't understand Ada."   I eventually
learned just how right he was.

With Ada, we are not trying to appeal to the programmer.  Rather,
we are concerned with good engineering practice.   Ada continues
to be the best language available when one is focused on engineering
rather than programming.

Richard Riehle