Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development

[Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 06/08/2012 05:40 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> On Friday, June 8, 2012 2:35:55 PM UTC-7, Jeffrey Carter wrote:
>
>> One nice thing about Ada is not needing to use a debugger.
>
> I don't get this comment.  Ada is a lot nicer than some languages at
> preventing you from making certain kinds of mistakes, but no language is able
> to prevent logic errors and certain dumb typos.  And if you make this kind of
> error and the program doesn't work, just the fact of its being written in Ada
> doesn't help you much.  There may less need for a debugger because Ada will
> prevent certain types of errors and things like constraint checks will catch
> some others that would cause havoc in C.  But it can't catch everything, and
> even if it does find an index that's out of range it won't tell you why the
> index was out of range.  I mean, Ada is a much better language than certain
> others for writing correct code, but this seems like a gross overstatement.

I haven't used a debugger for a long time. Usually Ada gives an idea of the kind 
of error and its location, and I can easily figure out what the problem is. In 
the rare case that that isn't true, it's quicker to stick in a few Put_Lines 
than to learn to use the debugger again. This is a self-reinforcing situation, 
of course.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"[I]f we should ever separate, my little plum,
I want to give you one little bit of fatherly advice. ... Never
give a sucker an even break."
Poppy
97

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