Re: libsafe and Debian installation
On Thu, 2002-04-25 at 03:47, Mark Eichin wrote:
> I recommend you look into it. Even if you don't use it, you can learn
> much from the type of accidents "built in" to C that Ada95 avoids
> *purely by choice of syntax*, without even getting into sophisticated
> features. This is not the place for me to go into further details,
> though, this thread has dragged on. But it's certainly the case that
> most linux advisories [not all, we are getting to *some* of the subtle
> ones] are about bugs that you can't accidently express in any other
> language [for the purposes of this issue, C++ isn't a distinct
> language :-)]
One thing I really like about Ada (although I confess, I hardly ever
have used it) is the strong enumerated types.
So you really can assign a variable a non-string value like "secure",
"unsecure", "unknown", instead of mapping the values to integers (like
in C, C++ or Java). The compiler takes care of the mapping for you, and
prevents you assigning a value from a non-compatable type.
Also, you don't have problems with "int" meaning different things on
different platforms, in Ada, you tell the compiler what range you want,
it it takes care of what type to use.
The only major downside I can think of in Ada, is that I have never
written any object orientated code, and to me (at least last time I
looked), it seemed kind of messy...
I seem to remember linking into third party modules isn't quite as
convenient as with C either.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: