Re: Why not gnat Ada in gcc?

[jfm2 at club-internet dot fr]

> 
> Richard Kenner wrote:
> > 
> >     Who is still programming in Ada? and why?
> > 
> > This is *really* off topic, but basically Ada is the language of choice for
> > safety-critical applications.  Much Ada programming nowadays in done in
> > companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Rockwell.  It is used
> > for such applications as avionics, air traffic control, and military
> > software.  Typical Ada applications are millions of lines of code.
> 
> It's worthwhile to remind the callow youths that the world does not actually
> revolve around GCC bootstraps and recompilation of the Linux kernel. :-)
> 

It's worthwhile to remind the callow youths that it is not because
something is standatrd in Unix that it is the best in world.  C became
the standard in Unix mailnly because for a time it was the only
language available.  By the time other languages became available it
was too late: using another language would have meant retraining
programmers and rewriting many libraries.  C is quite adequate for
writing kernels (its original purpose) but it is too low level for
application programming, makes programmers reinvent wheels (each
reinvented wheel is a potential bug) and has several architectural
flaws: it is far easier to get buffer overruns when you are handling
pointers to a zone of memory teminated by a \0 that when a string is a
zone of memory preceeded by a counter telling size since in the later
case the compiler or the runtime environment can tell you there is
something wrong.

I feel far better when nuclear plant software is not written in C/C++.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez