Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:26797 comp.lang.misc:4407
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!cmh117
From: CMH117@psuvm.psu.edu (Charles Hannum)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C strongly typed?
Message-ID: <90070.092253CMH117@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: 11 Mar 90 14:22:53 GMT
References: <862@enea.se> <90069.005634CMH117@psuvm.psu.edu> <873@enea.se>
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 31


In article <873@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) says:
>
>Stupidity. Ever heard of the work "mistake"? Say that I have the
>routine Macedonia declared as (in Ada syntax):
>
>   FUNCTION Macedonia(Granny_smith : IN Apple;
>                      Tangerine    : IN Orange) RETURN Some_type;
>
>Now, I'm calling this from another module. In which order comes
>the parameters now? Ah, it was probably the orange first, wasn't
>it? A strongly typed language like Ada will catch this error.
>With C or Pascal I have to spend half a day to find out why the
>damned fruit salad doesn't taste as intended.

Your point is well taken.  While I do often find C's liberal number conversion
useful, it is also annoying that I can't defined a new type, without defining
it as a structure (or union).

Oh well.  Fortunately, I haven't ever run into an application where I really
desparately needed name equivalence in anything but structured.  Perhaps some
day I will.

Then I'll switch to Eiffel.


Virtually,
- Charles Martin Hannum II       "Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within."
    (That's Charles to you!)     "To life immortal!"
  cmh117@psuvm.{bitnet,psu.edu}  "No noozzzz izzz netzzzsnoozzzzz..."
  c9h@psuecl.{bitnet,psu.edu}    "Mem'ry, all alone in the moonlight ..."