But other than "that" it's obsolete, right? Snicker snicker.
On Sat, 23 Aug 2014 10:27:30 -0500, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[email protected]>
wrote:
[email protected] (Tomasz Rola) writes:
So, now the 5-6 years old anecdote about one contractor stating that
"Ada is obsolete" makes much more sense, even though at the time I
read it, it sounded rude and immoral. It doesn't really matter anymore
what language will be choosen for a project - well, it may still be a
problem if one prefers to write Lisp (MHO: concise, elegant) over
writing Java (MHO: overly talkative and relying too much on external
tools and cargo cult procedures like refactoring - I guess almost
nobody writes Java in Emacs nowadays). But the source code is going to
be verified in theorem proover, automatically. And even the compiler
does not need to be trusted anymore, because one can compare exec file
with source and prove that one matches another.
ADA tends to still be used for "human rated" applications ... aka
human lives at risk ... like commercial airplane control systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29
from above:
Ada also supports run-time checks to protect against access to
unallocated memory, buffer overflow errors, range violations, off-by-one
errors, array access errors, and other detectable bugs. These checks can
be disabled in the interest of runtime efficiency, but can often be
compiled efficiently. It also includes facilities to help program
verification. For these reasons, Ada is widely used in critical systems,
where any anomaly might lead to very serious consequences, e.g.,
accidental death, injury or severe financial loss. Examples of systems
where Ada is used include avionics, railways, banking, military and
space technology.[6][7]
... snip ...
List of ADA uses
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html
in the 90s, bugs related to c-language pointer use accounted for the
majority of internet exploits. this started to shift some in the late
90s with increasing number of virus&trojan based exploits
I've frequently pontificated that the original mainframe tcp/ip product
was done in vs/pascal and had *NONE* of the pointer-related exploits
common in c-language implementations. some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#buffer
part of the problem is c-language pointer values can be ambiquous which
is not easily identifiable by source code analysis (there is currently
thread in comp.arch about difficulties with language features that are
abiquous or not stictly defined)
--
Using Opera's mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
