Re: Ada ad in Embedded Systems Programming stinks

[merlin@annwfn.com (Fred McCall)]

In <353tqe$7pa@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au Richard A. O'Keefe writes:

>I think you have misunderstood the reason why it is essential to keep
>checking the manual.  I personally am sick and tired of C code "that
>uses constructs that anybody can understand" but doesn't work.  Example:
>someone else's code I'm _still_ trying to fix after a couple of weeks
>(ok, I'm not doing this full time) which, amongst other things, assumes
>that (a) pointers and 'int's are the same size and (b) casting a pointer
>to an int preserves all the bits.  

Obviously written by someone who has been ignoring the advice of people
who know C (the phrase "All the world is not a VAX" emanating from the
direction of Toronto comes to mind).  Note that someone who does this
isn't going to be helped by a language manual.  They're going to need to
know a bit more about their environment -- which to my mind is
information they ought to know, anyway.

>The point of checking the manual is not to become intimate with all kinds
>of super-whizzy features that demonstrate your wizard-hood, but to learn
>what kinds of things to _avoid_. 

Or better yet, to learn what 'misfeatures' to look for in other peoples'
code.  Personally, I learned more C by reading comp.lang.c than I got
from the books.  Would that newsgroups were still as informative as they
used to be.

Howevver, I think it is a valid issue that Ada programmers typically
NEED to look in the language reference more often.  This is an expected
result of the language being 'pickier' about what it will let you do.

--
"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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merlin@annwfn.com -- I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.