Re: Ada ad in Embedded Systems Programming stinks

[mg@asp.camb.inmet.com (Mitch Gart)]

Yes, lint catches some errors in C programs.  But the Ada
and C type models are fundamentally different.  In Ada
you might have:

    type Time is new Integer;
    type Temperature is new Integer;

and then objects of these types are marked as being different, 
and cannot be assigned or mixed in arithmetic operations without 
a type conversion.  The equivalent in C is:

    typedef int Time;
    typedef int Temperature;

but now both of these types are treated like synonyms for "int".
All the integer assignment and arithmetic operations are available,
mixing objects of these types, without type coercions.  

Because of this fundamental difference in the type model, a whole 
class of errors won't be detected at compile time by any C compiler 
(ANSI or not) or lint.

	Mitch Gart