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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Variable Args, Ada
Date: 18 Oct 1994 12:44:37 -0400
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Distribution: comp
Message-ID: <380u1l$hmc@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <1994Oct15.215733.12384@atc1.atc.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: schonberg.cs.nyu.edu
Date: 1994-10-18T12:44:37-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"Why should any modern high-level language allow a programmer to code
something that will be "unsafe" or "dangerous".  Weren't the terse
grammar and compiler designed (in part) to prevent that?"

Any generally usable programming language that intends to be useful for
systems programming (e.g. writing device drivers, or other low level
stuff) needs some access to "unsafe" stuff.

Similarly there are times when even at a relatively high level of
abstraction it is reasonable to break the type security (consider
for example the problem of efficient hashing of floating-point
values).

The point is that the language should be designed so that such unsafe
usage is well advertised and can be easily controlled. That is why in
Ada you need to write a lot of "junk", including a notice at the top of
your file ("with unchecked conversion") to do what in some languages
could be done in a very straightforward way, TOO straightforward and
too easily abused.