Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com> wrote in message
news:1110378745.155345.221890@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
...
> To be both professional and efficient, how about if we just paste in
> the entire text of the LRM before each statement? That would leave
> nobody room for _any_ doubt about what the code means. Oh...well,
> you're probably right: to go with, we'd better paste in the entire text
> of a real dictionary, and (just in case) a complete set of books
> teaching how to read English. The people you're obviously targeting as
> reading the code undoubtedly need that -- after all, every word in
> "Language Reference Manual" has three whole syllables!

That's certainly the process it takes to write a language standard; you have
to decide what every word means, or even specify the dictionary to use if
the word isn't defined in the standard. Ada programmers do care about such
things. It's not unusual to put a reference to the standard (or nowdays, a
link to the standard) into comments of Ada code.

There is an art to how much needs to be explicit, but if in doubt (and when
it comes to non-obvious language rules like precidence or visibility, it's
always in doubt), it is always better to err on the side of explicitness.

>Ada advocate: "The world WOULD be better if you used Ada."

And the world IS better because of the various rock solid programs I wrote
in Ada. I suspect that many of the people in comp.lang.ada could and would
say the same.

OTOH, there is a lot of "cool" code out there that crashes systems and adds
security holes. Those things are much less likely in Ada code (certainly not
impossible, of course, especially since we have to sit on top of C-based
OSes).

                         Randy Brukardt


It's not unusual