> 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
