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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Tue, 13 Feb 2001 08:40:28 -0700
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"S. Ron Oliver" <[log in to unmask]>
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"S. Ron Oliver" <[log in to unmask]>
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At 06:33 PM 2/10/01 -0500, Michael Feldman wrote:

>True. But much of this discussion goes back to the early 70s with
>Smalltalk (and possibly even further, to the late 60s with Simula).
>It _certainly_ did not start with C++, which first emerged in the
>early 80s, about the same time as Ada 83. Originally called "C with
>Classes", it was named C++ around 1986, if memory serves.
>
>Dynamic dispatching was a technique that was known to the Green team
>(whose design became Ada). [THere was a myth around that they didn't
>know about this OO stuff, but in fact, Ichbiah (and maybe others on
>the team) had worked on a Simula compiler and knew very well what
>this was about.] Some of the early Ada writing indicated that they
>were worried about the runtime performance of dynamic dispatching.

Ah!  Some good historical tid bits.  I knew some of this, but not all.

. . .

>And of course there was no validation suite for C++, so these design
>bugs slipped through more easily than they could have with Ada.
>

Yes, the validation suite.  This is a VERY key point and one that I should
raise more often.  But it just seems so natural to me that there SHOULD be
a validation suite, for EVERY language.  So, I tend to not mention it,
assuming others have the same view.

Why is our industry so far behind in their view of something so obviously
beneficial as a compiler validation process?  This confounds me.

sro


S. Ron Oliver, semi-retired professor of Computer Science and Computer
Engineering.  www.csc.calpoly.edu/~sroliver

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