Re: Introductory Presentations, especially aimed at C++ programmers!

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> I'm not convinced: because of C's lack of checks, more bugs make it
> through the testing process,

How? Your unit test contains the checks for proper program outcome, so you don't need them in the language. And conversely, if your tests are incomplete (that is, their coverage is incomplete), then language checks will not help, either, as they will not be ignited.

> An Ada programmer might code the same
> bug, but it might get caught right away during the developer's private
> workflow

How? Let's say I made a bug that overflows the array under some specific conditions, but my "private workflow" for testing does not involve input that overflows that array. This error will go to release, no matter what is the programming language.

You might argue that there is some class of errors that can appear harmless even under test (like overflowing forth-and-back arithmetic) and language checks can help detect those errors even with partial unit tests. This would be a good argument for Ada.

You can also claim that Ada errors are "safer" (the damage containment that I already mentioned) or that error handling in Ada is more assisting, thus reducing the diagnostic effort, but these are different arguments.

> I think the claim was that it's impossible for humans to stop making
> silly errors in general

Agreed. But the argument was that Ada would prevent humans from making such errors, which is (yet) an unfounded claim.
Of course, there are errors that can be detected at compile-time and there are some that are even prevented by the grammar itself - arguably Ada is stronger in this area than C (or C++), but buffer overflows are not, at least directly, in this category.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com