From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,9ce095aba33fe8d0 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!proxad.net!134.158.69.22.MISMATCH!in2p3.fr!oleane.net!oleane!hunter.axlog.fr!nobody From: Jean-Pierre Rosen Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Negative float problem Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 15:20:44 +0100 Organization: Adalog Message-ID: References: <1130351574.313991.229420@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <10mspnley7gzu$.1swtj67sv0ldr$.dlg@40tude.net> <38tcpxwxfigo$.18ysjyp9ml92c$.dlg@40tude.net> <2ybc7t4au7g$.166dxwfrds1so$.dlg@40tude.net> <18nrnlg9zzl5a.k8rl3ajwauqi.dlg@40tude.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: mailhost.axlog.fr Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: s1.news.oleane.net 1130943686 31948 195.25.228.57 (2 Nov 2005 15:01:26 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@oleane.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 15:01:26 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (Windows/20050716) X-Accept-Language: fr, en In-Reply-To: Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6123 Date: 2005-11-02T15:20:44+01:00 List-Id: Maciej Sobczak a �crit : > As Samuel Tardieu said earlier about the original problem - "... almost > any Ada-er has learnt this rule the hard way one day or another". For me > this sentence expresses some defficiency in the language. If programmers > are bound to having hard rules no matter what, then I'd prefer those > rules to be easier in 95% cases and more difficult in the remaining > corners than the other way round. > Since you are new to Ada, there is something that you must understand. The Ada language has been designed in such a way that either a construct always works, and works the same with every implementation, or does not compile. There is no space for "sometimes", "maybe", "depends", and other things like that that are common in other languages. The price for this is that the user is sometimes frustrated, because it seems that something very natural from a user's point of view is rejected by the compiler. Quite often, the reason is that the simple case would work, but the general one would not. Hence it is always rejected. In the long run, this is quite reassuring. You get confident in the language and the compiler, because you understand that they are there to protect you - sometimes from issues that you don't even know about. And you will accept the (small) price you have to pay for this. (Agreed: some discussions on c.l.a. show that not everybody is accepting the price :-) -- --------------------------------------------------------- J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr) Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr