Re: Ada ad in Embedded Systems Programming stinks

[kst@alsys.com (Keith Thompson @pulsar)]

In <JGOODSEN.94Sep7184648@trinidad.radsoft.com> jgoodsen@trinidad.radsoft.com (John Goodsen) writes:
> In article <1994Sep4.092729.21408@lmpsbbs.comm.mot.com> davidk@mcil.comm.mot.com (David Kramer) writes:
>    To add to Norman Cohen's list of reasons why an Ada compiler is more
>    effective than lint:
> 
>      It is much too easy to get around type mismatches in C - as any 
>      unscrupulous C programmer knows - all you have to do is use a cast!
[...]
> This isn't much easier than doing unchecked conversions in Ada.
> You identified a project management/process problem, not really a
> technological advantage of one language over another...

Any Ada program that uses an unchecked conversion must have an explicit
context clause for the generic function Unchecked_Conversion.  This makes
it very easy to tell that the program is doing something low-level and
potentially dangerous.  Furthermore, Ada clearly distinguishes between
unchecked and checked conversions.  C uses the same construct (the cast)
for arithmetic conversions from int to float that it uses to coerce one
pointer type to another.

Ada doesn't prevent you from writing ugly, low-level, non-portable code,
but it makes it more difficult to do it accidentally -- and that *is*
a technological advantage.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith)  kst@alsys.com
TeleSoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Alsys, Inc.
10251 Vista Sorrento Parkway, Suite 300, San Diego, CA, USA, 92121-2718
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