Re: Ada and C++: A request for comparison/contrast/relative benefits

[cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexa s.edu!csc.ti.com!tilde.csc.ti.com!mksol!mccall@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (fred j mcc all 575-3539)]

In <CC0w2v.Iuo@crdnns.crd.ge.com> groleau@e7sa.crd.ge.com (Wes Groleau x1240 C7
3-8) writes:

>Also, receiving a Turing award doesn't make a person infallible.
>C.A.R. Hoare also once said (paraphrase; someone please post the exact 
>quote):  One of the worst things that ever happened to our profession was
>the invention of symbolic debuggers, cross-reference tools, strong typing, etc
.
>because we let the tools find our errors instead of "doing it right the first
>time"  There is SOME truth to this, but most of us feel it's better to have
>a tool find all ten errors in a few minutes than to spend hours finding
>nine of them by eyeball.

Oddly, I believe that Djikstra (?) has also espoused such a position.
Something to the effect that developers shouldn't *have* compilers.
Test should have the compilers.  He apparently thinks (or thought)
that wanting to avoid having something kicked back by Test coupled
with the lack of compilers would cause developers to work harder to
avoid minor errors and prevent them from 'tweaking' code until it
passes the tests rather than designing and then implementing to the
design. 

Personally, I think what you'd get would be a black market in
compilers and syntax checkers, were you to try to implement such a
policy in the real world.

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.