Re: Ada noob here! Is Ada widely used?

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:27:45 +0200, Dmitry A. Kazakov  
<mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> a écrit:
> They will rather distract from design in favor
> debugging.
As an old Eiffel “advocator”, I can say no, as long as you read contract  
clauses before using any component holding such a contract (just like you  
have to know the signature of a subprogram before being able to use it).  
And whenever an error occurred, which is caught (likely early) by a clause  
violation, you then have an interpretation of the error. There is nothing  
like an interpretation, when in a debugger, you see this variable X has  
this value Y which turns into the Z behavior. Even if a clause violation  
pass control to a debugger (I had created my own in that purpose with  
SmallEiffel), you still have a debugger with an interpretation of an  
erroneous state.

> Ada was designed as a language of little or no debugging.
> Unfortunately it rapidly loses the ground.
Agree. But there is no magic keyword, no magic syntactic construct, this  
target needs paradigm, process and construction techniques. And this is  
the purpose of DbC. Ada needs something to target “little or no  
debugging”, it cannot do it by-itself. I agree there are other ways, more  
strict and formal ways to achieve the same, ... however, this would  
unlikely meet a large community agreement (for the reasons given before).


-- 
There is even better than a pragma Assert: a SPARK --# check.
--# check C and WhoKnowWhat and YouKnowWho;
--# assert Ada;
--  i.e. forget about previous premises which leads to conclusion
--  and start with new conclusion as premise.