Re: Heartbleed

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

Le Fri, 18 Apr 2014 20:02:22 +0200, Jeffrey Carter  
<spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> a écrit:

> On 04/18/2014 01:48 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>
>> (2) You have to pay for that compiler and the compilers people can  
>> choose
>> for alternative languages are free of charge.
>
> This, I think, I a valid part of the reason for C's dominance: there is  
> a free C compiler for almost every platform. While there are free Ada  
> compilers for the most common platforms, there are far more platforms  
> without a free Ada compiler than platforms without a free C compiler.

That's because an Ada compiler is far more complex to design. This may be  
another rational for a standard Ada minimal *frozen* *subset* (not a new  
language) without every thing which is finally a derived form of the most  
fundamental constructs with additional limitations: I would say keeping  
core type definitions (ranges, enumerations, arrays) with discriminated  
record, package and package hierarchy, renaming declarations, C foreign  
interface, a library reduced to unavoidable system interface and memory  
allocation, optional tasking, access types with some cut‑off, and no more  
(no tagged types, no interface types, no DbC, may be no exception  
handlers, no generics, …). This still won't disallow to use SPARK (or  
other formal systems) with it ;-) .

As a summary, core type systems, package hierarchy, renaming, basic system  
interface. Would already be a lot of added value compared to C.

Any stupidities in this message may be forgiven, I wrote this straight  
away as it came to my mind (red‑face).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University