Re: Ada design

salomon@silver.cs.umanitoba.ca (Daniel J. Salomon) writes:


> Isn't that what a lot of programming language design is about these
> days: trying to find safe and simple ways of doing the things we used
> to do all the time but in unsafe ways? I don't think we have arrived
> at that goal yet. Ada is really the language of the nineties: forbid
> smoking, forbid cholesterol, forbid sex. Maybe its better for me, but
> it sure takes the fun out of life.


I agree with you here. I used to work in C, and I kind of miss the
fun times I had when I put a ++ on the wrong side of a variable, which
caused the code to write a value past the end of an array, overwriting
something in the malloc free list, which didn't cause any problems
until two hundred allocations later it finally got around to using the
bad value, which didn't get caught right away because it was actually
a valid address, it just ended up allocating something that overwrote
one of my other data structures, which didn't cause any problems until
some time later, giving me tons of fun for the next two days trying to
track down that one ^#%%#@ing bug.


Now that I'm working in Ada, this sort of thing rarely happens, and
now I have to spend more of my time doing non-fun, BORING things like
designing algorithms to solve problems and writing the code and
watching it work like a charm.


But despite all this, there's still lots of fun in my life. There's
still the fun of having someone else's C program crash when I'm trying
to use it for something important. Or the fun of getting busy signals
every time I try to call anyone for hours (this actually happened in
Southern California a few years ago) because a C program at AT&T used
"=" where "==" was intended, or something similar.


[:-) for the sarcasm-impaired]


                                                                -- Adam
--

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