Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Ada is not all about safety - although that is a factor in its design. 
Some of it is intended to help one organize one's thoughts about the 
programming problem and encourage abstraction. If one thinks in terms of 
zeros and ones instead of higher level abstractions (such as 
enumerations or numerical types associated with the thing they are 
counting, etc.) one might find themselves "fighting the compiler". While 
Ada is perfectly good at getting down to the bits and bytes and in some 
ways better than C++ - (can C++ provide representation clauses on data 
structures to control exactly how bits are packed and ordered?) a lot of 
Ada is aimed at abstracting you away from the zeros and ones, Partly for 
portability across platforms but mostly to encourage you to think about 
the problem differently.

When programming in Ada, you can't think "C++" and try to do exactly 
what you do in C++ only in Ada syntax. The same would be true in the 
other direction. You have to work with the language rather than try to 
fight what it is. Doing so, you'll likely realize the benefits intended 
by the designers of the language.

MDC

Jerry Coffin wrote:
> 
> The first problem is to define what you mean by safety. Bjarne has been
> fairly explicit that most safety features in C++ are intended to
> prevent accidents, not intentional subversion. It's always seemed to me
> that Ada has had a rather muddled idea of the "threat model", so the
> language features have never been entirely aligned to a single intent.
> Some parts appear intended to prevent accidents, but are quite easy to
> subvert when one wishes to do so. Other parts appear to have been
> designed with the intent of preventing even intentional subversion, but
> fail to do so, and simply render some things quite a bit uglier than
> there seems to be good reason for.
> 

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Marin David Condic
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