This plays into some recent conversations about "efficiency" vs "resilience."
> Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 20:06:16 +0100 > From: k...@stock-consulting.com > To: brin-l@mccmedia.com > Subject: Re: Obama II > > > I know as a fact that the Defense Department said they > > would require that all programming for applications they used would have to > > be done in Ada (I think within 5 years) because Ada was a compiler that > > automatically eliminated bugs. > > AFAIK, the Ada compiler can detect many programmer mistakes at compile > time. Of course, one might say that Ada that's mainly because Ada > imposes so many restrictions on the programmer that the chance to make > mistakes is greatly increased (compared to more "relaxed" languages, > which do, for example, implicit type conversion). Ada also supports > run-time-checks - which detects bugs when it's already too late (or > may even cause bugs in extreme cases). > > Compared to other languages of the time, like Fortran, it's clearly > superior in detecting some classes of bugs early. It also reduces the > programmer's efficiency, resulting the number of bugs per time compare > to more efficient languages. > > However, the "best bugs" are introduced during programming, but much > earlier. Catching bugs at the earliest possible time is expensive, but > the ROI is immense and outweighs the cost by several orders of > magnitude. Of course, any manager who was reading this dropped out at > the word "expensive", so defective software will remain the standard. > > > Okay, the word "standard" reminds to get back on-topic. I suspect that > the reason for the choice of Ada was that Ada was the first > standardized HL programming language. Oh, the military loves > standards. No further explanation necessary. > > Best regards, Klaus > > > _______________________________________________ > http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com >
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