home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: news.sprintlink.net!rockyd!cmcl2!schonberg!dewar
- From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c
- Subject: Re: C++ vs Ada for large project
- Date: 11 Feb 1996 10:17:07 -0500
- Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
- Message-ID: <dewar.824051554@schonberg>
- References: <w4wx5wc1a2.fsf@cln46ac> <4ffjrq$i8k@qualcomm.com> <4fgn1t$ku8@nntpa.cb.att.com> <4fjo8l$251@ux1.lmu.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: schonberg.cs.nyu.edu
- X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 (NOV)
-
- Ray asks
-
- "I do wonder, though, to what extent the "newer" features of C++ (strings,
- namespaces, etc.) will be used in practice. There are a lot of
- programmers who get by with header files, char*'s and so on."
-
- Yes, indeed, an important question. Often the trouble with languages is not
- the language itself, but the way in which it was used.
-
- A few years ago, I was teaching Ada 83 and C in a graduate programming
- languages course. We were looking at these languages at a fairly rigorous
- level, and also discussing the issues of large scale solftware engineering
- using these languages.
-
- I taught Ada first, and described how packages were used as a structuring
- mechanism. Then I looked at headers in C, and noted that they can fulfill
- much of the same functions, but that additional tools are needed to automate
- this approach if it is to be reliable, particularly for example for dealing
- with global variables in this context (which must be defined only once
- despite multiple inclusion of the related headers). I described the tool
- we had generated to handle headers in he implementation of Ada/Ed.
-
- I had a student from Bell Labs in the class who was involved in the
- development of large scale switching systems in C. He was a useful
- soure of information on the real world of large scale high realiability
- C development, so, quite innocently, I asked him what kind of tools
- were used at Bell for header maintenance and consistency checking.
-
- His amazing answer: NONE! He said that things were done by hand,, and it
- wasn't too bad since they did not have "that many" variables in headers,
- and they did not "often" change functions specs.
-
- :-)
-
-