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

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

"Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> wrote in message 
news:o2a6vq$q8s$1@dont-email.me...
> 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 be fair, the attempt to overflow the buffer came from a Windows API call, 
which wouldn't let you do that no matter what the language. A C program 
could still get in trouble by ignoring the failing API result, but that 
wouldn't be hard in Ada, either. The main difference here is the culture 
surrounding the languages, where in Ada a library ignoring failure would be 
a library no one would use; can't say that about C libraries.

                                          Randy.