Re: "Ada and C++", from comp.software-eng

[jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>> Making a long story short, it turns out that c++ is the Lord High
>> Substitute for Ada and there is a rather large class of applications for
>> which c++ may well turn out to be the preferred substitute.  (I know,
>> that class probably includes 100% of the applications, but this is the
>> Air force, Mr. Jones!)

Yeah, right. First of all, C++ isn't even a fucking standard, so any
hope of validation is a writeoff. Second of all, of the N features
C++ rather gracelessly grafts onto C, N-2 of them are already available
in Ada (e.g. strong typing, private types, spec/body separation,
exceptions, generics, etc etc etc). The missing two are user-defined
initialization/finalization stuff, and inheritance, and both of these
are being addressed in Ada 9x. Third, C++ is
new enough that it has no industrial strength tools available for
it: no smart compilers (and lord knows you're gonna need em when
changing base classes), no decent architectural level tools, etc.
Fourth, it has no proven track record on anything approaching a
real system (e.g. hard realtime, life-critical, very big, very
complex); I've seen lots and lots of research toys written in it,
but so what?--I've seen research toys written in CLOS, Flavors,
Actor, Loops, SETL, Smalltalk-80, etc etc etc etc.

To override the
Ada mandate and deliberately adopt C++ on a real project would be
lunacy of the highest order--and probably constitutes criminal
negligence.
--
* "Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada." *
*      - P.G. Plauger, Convener and Secretary of the ANSI C Committee   *
*                                                                       *
*                The opinions expressed herein are my own.              *