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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: What's wrong with C++?
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011 20:24:12 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2011-10-07T20:24:12-05:00
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"Peter C. Chapin" <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu> wrote in message 
news:EeadnV_UDMIFJRbT4p2dnAA@giganews.com...
> On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:00:20 +0200, Yannick Duch�ne (Hibou57) wrote:
>
>> So OK, it is formally proved that is not even sure a given C++ source
>> file can really be compiled or not. That's big, ouch.
...
> In our work at VTC on translating some NASA software to SPARK we
> encountered a situation where the SPARK simplifier took an "infinitely"
> long time to execute... well, okay, it only took about an hour. Yes it
> did terminate but it took so long that development was impractical (no
> different, really, than true non-termination). Our response: fix the
> source.

But isn't that a really terrible error message? When I've had compiler bugs 
that caused infinite loops, I've often spent many hours trying to find a 
work-around, and only trial-and-error works (there being no information at 
all as to the cause). And I've had a great advantage to the vast majority of 
programmers in that I have access to the compiler source and a good 
knowledge of how the compiler works internally. The vast majority of 
programmers would have no such advantages (and probably could not wait for 
compiler support to bail them out, either).

So a language design which has a significantly >0% chance of having this 
happen is potentially a time-bomb in your development schedules. (Such bugs 
have stopped my work cold until a work-around could be found.) That seems 
bad (how bad depends on the likelyhood of it happening).

                               Randy.