Re: "Subtract C, add Ada"

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

"Dennis Ritchie once said in an interview that there is *nothing* in the
 C language that keeps compiler writers from issuing stringent warnings
 about stuff that most Ada people take for granted."

Dennis may have said this, but it is misleading. Yes, there is stuff that
Ada people take for granted that C compilers could (and in some compilers
*do*) check for.

But there are lots of things that Ada people take for granted that cannot
be checked in C, there just isn't enough information. C has no separation
of scalar types, no ranges on scalar types, and the ubquitous use of
pointers, and their similarity to arrays means that sophisticated aliasing
analysis is required to even approximate the type checking that occurs
in the context of access types in Ada. There are many other examples.