Re: Introductory Presentations, especially aimed at C++ programmers!

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

On 12/07/2016 04:03 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
> To be fair, though, such things can happen in Ada, too. Case in point:
> something that happened to me today.
>
> A customer had what appears to be a permissions problem installing
> Janus/Ada, so before contacting us, they tried an uninstall. The uninstaller
> crashed. I asked them to send me the exact message, and it proved to be
> overflow error in Claw.Registry. Tracking that down showed that the buffer
> for reading a registry variable (so stuff could be removed from it) wasn't
> big enough. Of course, Ada detected the error and crashed, but that's only
> an iota better than what would have happened in C (the uninstaller didn't do
> its job either way).

Well, no, that's not the same thing. You didn't overflow a buffer; you tried to 
overflow a buffer, but Ada wouldn't let you. To my mind, that's exponentially 
better than what you get in C. Nobody was able to take control of your computer 
because your program crashed. And exponentially better than being prevented from 
overflowing a buffer is being able to figure out how to do

declare
    B : Buffer (1 .. Just_The_Right_Size);

which is usually possible.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"In the frozen land of Nador they were forced to
eat Robin's minstrels, and there was much rejoicing."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
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