Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>> of attention, and constrains your style quite a lot.
> Which is a good thing. It escapes me why spaghetti code is long since 
> considered a bad thing, but writing spaghetti data is some sort of 
> necessity.

I think you and Jeff misunderstood me about style constraining.  I mean
the constraints MAKE you write spaghetti code when you prefer otherwise.
Like if Ada got rid of its structured control flow statements so the
only thing you could use was if...goto, that's the type of style
constraint I'm thinking of.

You might have imagined something like eliminating goto (decreasing
spaghetti instead of increasing it) but I meant it the other way around ;-).

> "Smart pointers" are rather kick-the-can; the only sensible solution
> is no pointers.

A cleaner approach imho is immutable data passed by reference (this is
how most of functional programming works).  It's not really feasible to
code in that style in Ada, as far as I can tell.  Aside from language
issues, I think it's unfeasible without a gc, but maybe I'm wrong.