Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!igor!rutabaga!jls From: jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Source File Organization Message-ID: Date: 2 Mar 91 19:55:10 GMT References: <1991Feb26.045242.23453@rfengr.com> <4836@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> <4070@bnr-rsc.UUCP> <1991Mar1.143534.50@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <984@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> Sender: news@Rational.COM Lines: 49 >Hear, hear. Well, if you wanted to avoid a language war, you're off to a lousy start. >For instance, C has speed and expressability at the cost of safety. ? C, written according to prevailing standards, resembles line noise more than anything else. Or are you using "expressibility" to mean something besides "intelligibility"? As for the claim that C has speed (and, if I read the subtext correctly, that C is faster than Ada)--horseshit. We sell Ada compilers that beat C compilers like a gong (whetstones, dhrystones, etc). >Ada chose >expressability over the others. Excuse me, but OTHER people complain that Ada is "too safe" (whatever the hell THAT means), because it does range checking, type checking, etc. Are you speaking of some OTHER Ada when you say it did not choose safety? And I CERTAINLY hope you aren't making the claim that C is safer than Ada--that would be stoopid: C has no range checks and virtually no type checking (untyped functions accepting an arbitrary number of arguments of arbitrary type and return an array of arbitrary size of pointers to functions accepting an arbitrary number of arguments of arbitrary type certainly does not seem safe to me). Also, remember the joke with the punchline "I'd be fast too, if I didn't have to arrive at the right answer". Just because code executes quickly doesn't necessarily mean it executes CORRECTLY. Ada, by performing checking that C does not perform, stands a considerably better chance of not poking a hole in the kernel, etc. This tends to be an important consideration when you're building satellites and other sorts of things that are hard to reboot when they get wedged. Say--you don't suppose this has anything to do with why the DoD insisted people use Ada instead of C to build such things, do you? >Some other examples: assembly language >is the ultimate example of speed over expressability and safety. Yep. That's why we use compilers! >Also note that the point that a language finds itself in safety/speed/express- >ability is determined by the skill of the compiler/interpreter writer, the >state of compiler/language theory at the moment This might explain why our Ada compilers beat C compilers like a gong. -- ***** DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed herein are my own. Duh. Like you'd ever be able to find a company (or, for that matter, very many people) with opinions like mine. -- "When I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you."