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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: a new language, designed for safety !
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 15:43:46 -0400
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Date: 2014-06-04T15:43:46-04:00
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"Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net> writes:

> ...This is not surprising for the 1980s-vintage
> Objective-C, back when Smalltalk was often held up as the ultimate
> state-of-the-art in OO; Smalltalk had much the same fundamental
> unsafety, due in turn much the same selector mechanisms as
> Objective-C.

Yeah, Objective-C is basically just Smalltalk tacked onto the side of C.

But I wouldn't call it "unsafe" if you get a run-time error.
To me, "unsafe" means "misuse can cause unpredictable behavior".
Array indexing is safe in Ada (you get a run-time error if
you go out of bounds), but unsafe in C (anything can happen
if you go out of bounds).

Anyway, I guess your point is that Ada prevents dangling dispatch at
compile time, which is a good thing, whereas Swift, Objective C,
and Smalltalk do not.

- Bob