FYI, engineering of any kind is an anal retentive profession. It's the underlying concept of getting things right that's anal, and the anality is inherited by any procedure or tool that supports that goal.
That's as true for a mechanical engineer as it is for a software engineer.
> My biggest peeve about Ada, which I believe MAY have been corrected since, was that it didn't directly support variable-length character strings.
As poster "Ada95" has already said, that 'feature' of Ada83 has been modified in Ada95 by the addition of two more classes of strings, bounded and unbounded.
> That's something I also hates about what's called "Standard Pascal" which makes you use fixed-length character arrays. Are we still stuck in the days of Fortran? Did these language designers never consider that one might want to perform string manipulation that resulted in a length not predicted at development time?
I agree wholeheartedly. IMO it was clever to think of a string as an array of char, but the concept was fundamentally flawed. Strings should be conceived as a natural data type with their own natural set of operations, not as a funny kind of array.
> Consider the fact that the code for the Ariane 5 rocket which crashed [eiffel.com] because of a software problem, was written in Ada.
If you search the Web you should be able to find the official report on the cause of the crash. I read it on the Web a year or two ago, but didn't bookmark it.
Short version: it wasn't the choice of language, nor even a software bug at all.
Intermediate version: For economy, the A5 engineers decided to re-use a sensor/controller hardware unit from the A4, since it and its associated software had worked flawlessly. Unfortunately, they did not review that part's specs carefully enough, because the A5's more powerful engines generated a thrust/acceleration/velocity/displacement that was outside the part's design spec. During the flight the part determined, correctly, that whatever it measured was out of range, and started dumping debug data on the rocket's control bus - exactly as it had been designed to do, but with unfortunate results when it happened in the sky rather than on a workbench.
The software worked flawlessly. The design sux0red.
> I am not trying to dispute that Ada is a good language for critical safety related software... but it is only as good as the people and methodology/process being employed.
That is indeed true. However, my experience in using Ada is that it completely eliminates whole classes of bugs by catching them at compile time, so the only bugs I get are those related to the basic algorithmic design of my program.
In general, Ada will catch things at compile time that most languages will only catch at run time, and it will catch things at run time that in most languages will only be caught if someone notices that the output is incorrect. Think about that next time you're debugging a program.
> Noway does Ada help avoid bugs by being a type cast unless your talking about the stupidest little bugs imaginable.
Unfortunately, stupid little bugs find their way into operational programs. But if you have a compiler that can catch them at compile time, they don't find their way into the operational program. End of story.
Also, notice that for a given programming team the number of stupid little bugs will be proportional to the size of the code base, and for 1.5MLOC that generally translates to a lot of stupid little bugs.
> ADA LACKS the debuggers and useability of C.
I used the VAX debugger with Ada [sic] over a decade ago. For OSS fans, there's GVD, the GNU Visual Debugger, with full Ada [sic] support. Don't let your prejudices lead you into making uninformed assertions.
(BTW, GVD supports C and C++ as well as Ada, and is designed to allow plug-ins to support additional languages, so give it a try if you're a C or C++ programmer and would like to have a visual debugger. I believe it's built on GDB, so its basic operations may already be familiar to many.)
> Its a hard painful language to use and learn and isnt as tried and true as C.
What is your unit of measure for "tried and true"?
> Also Im sure you can get 1.5 million lines into 1 million if you use C.
Are you sure about that? Ada [sic] does require rigorous type definitions, but once you've made them it often lets you program at a very high level of abstraction.
Please save the FUD for audiences that are unfamiliar with the subject matter.
> Software functionality should not be fundamentally different from hardware functionality.
Am I to understand that you are saying that software, like hardware, should only fail when it fails?
Granted, we have a software reliability crisis on our hands. But hardware isn't generally fault-free either. I've had a lot more Zip drives die on me than I've had kernel panics. And arguably a kernel is much more complex than the design of a removable disk drive.
> An algorithmic system is temporally inconsistent and unstable by nature.
That's an absurd claim. It's possible to prove correct behavior for algorithmic systems. Time is explicitly accounted for in most such proofs.
The biggest engineering difference between software and hardware is that people find software errors acceptable, or even normal, whereas they have never reconciled themselves to, say, collapsing bridges or wings falling off of airplanes. When that attitude changes we'll start seeing software that rivals hardware in reliability, not before. Most of the engineering concepts required for producing good software have been around for quite a while.
> Stonent Imagine a Beowulf cluster of whatever this story is about!
They already thought of that. You see, while they rarely mention it at air shows, the realy reason airplanes fly in formation is because those "formations" are actually high-availability clusters for their avionics software.
> Why is it cool to think that the United States Government is out to spy on everyone and in general fuck things up?
It isn't "cool", it's a simple recognition of the facts. Did you miss the news last month when it came out that the FBI had a 2^16 page file on one of CA's uni presidents in the 70's, simply because they didn't think he was "tough enough" on liberal professors? Or the earlier revelation that they had a whopping big file on that Dangerous Enemy of the Republic, Albert Einstein?
These people have been at it so long that their primary motive for spying now is that they've forgotten how else to act.
> Slashdot views are so far to the left that they've wrapped around to those of the ultra right Montana Freemen.
What has Left-Right got to do with it? Not wanting to be spied on is "normal".
> Given how patent-encumbered JPEG-2000, MPEG-4 et. al. are, this will seriously interfere with open implementation of these standards. Would that that would slow their adoption....
Unfortunately, this won't slow anything's adoption, it will just keep the little guys out. The big boys will just say "you can use mine if I can use yours", essentially getting to use everything for free while raising the bar for people who can't ante up.
Encumbered standards and patent office idiocy are very popular in certain quarters. (And not because they promote innovation.)
> I run Windows XP on a machine and, no joke, one day a few weeks ago I came home to a BSOD. So they say XP is more stable, but when it goes down, it goes down.
Yeah, but it goes down in a more stable sort of way than the old ones did.
> No, BSOD jokes are just another example of the "FUD" that Linux users profess to hate when it comes from Microsoft but love to spew from their own mouths. Windows 2000 and Windows XP even more so are pretty damn stable... Spout all the anecdotal evidence that you want, but I can tell you that my Windows 2000-based laptop and desktop have not crashed once since upgrading to Professional.
<yawn>So, what exactly do you do at Microsoft?</yawn>
> Your "joke" was the first with a funny moderation on it that i saw. I would like to take the opportunity to address the rest of the slashbots and say "all the rest of the windows 98 BSOD jokes are going to suck".... I'd like to see linux circa 1998 try and power a car.
You probably wouldn't have too look too hard to find a Linux system that hasn't been down since 1998.
> Socialism promises everything and delivers nothing, except to the elite in control.
I suppose you think it's just coincidence that so many members of the US Administration are former CEOs, boardsitters, etc.? That the US Congress is increasingly populated by people who were already rich when the got into politics? (To say nothing about being richer when they get out?)
Face it: capitalism produces ruling elites too.
> Capitalism is an inherently equal system, where any person can hold their own and even become successful purely by hard work and merit.
Actually, having a high-bandwidth connection to the Good Ole Boy Network will get you a lot further, a lot faster.
Surely even you aren't so naive as to think George Bush's business and political careers have been the result of hard work and personal merit?
I suppose you're unaware that even <hatsoff>the Good Ole USA</hatsoff> is partly socialist, by any meaningful definiton of the term.
And that's probably no coincidence: I suspect that the adoption of partial socialism is what prevented ComIntern from sweeping the west during the '30s. Indeed, it appears that the amount of socialism adopted by western democracies varies pretty much inversely with their distance from the Soviet Union.
The smart elites, regardless of their political views, make sure they hand out enough to the poor to keep armed rebellion in check; there's no advantage in losing everything just to abide by some political philosophy.
> has made a strong effort to convince the public (and rather sucessfully, given media reports) that the true source of terror is Iraq and Saddam Hussein - the old, not-quite-vanquished enemy of Bush's daddy.
I-i-i want a war
Ju-u-ust like the war That reelected^w (oops!) droveuptheratingsof Dear Old Dad!
I'm genuinely curious why the Old Guard is so eager to wage Gulf War II, but even more curious, IMO, is the fact that to all appearances the group that is pushing so hard for it is the same group that wants to kill the Crusader artillery system on the grounds^w excuse that "We'll never fight another heavy-metal war like the Gulf War".
> Looked at from today's perspective (as the original article does), where most of these nations have constitutions that have teeth in them, it's clear that most of these governments are not capable of deploying widespread down-to-the-common-civilian "room 101"-style law enforcement
How innocent of you. Well, at least you hedge your bets by qualifying yourself with "widespread" and "down-to-the-common-civilian".
> Sure, the idea of telescreens in every home was scary, but it was just one facet of 1984. How about constant warfare to keep production levels high and boost GNP?
One of my favorite amusements these days is watching the Administration's juggling act, trying to terrify the public so it will support a very vague "war" effort and an accelerated erosion of civil liberties, and simultaneously to reassure the public that everything is A-OK, in order to drive the stock market back up. (Recent corporate scandal news has obfuscated this conflict somewhat, but it's still there if you look.)
> Keeping a high prison population is also a good waste product that boosts GNP. In the U.S. the prison population has gone from 200,000 in early 1970's to over 2 million in 2002. The majority of that is due to nonviolent drug offenders.
I wonder sometimes whether that is partly aimed at reducing the (reported) unemployment.
> Yet prison construction and technology is one of the highest growth industries in the U.S., and it's basically corporate welfare.
In some states they are going further, contracting out the administration of prison facilities to privately held corporations, as well as the construction.
It is also interesting to compare the cost of sending a citizen to college vs. incarcerating a citizen for four years, yet the public seems to be much more enthusiastic about funding prisons than they are about funding education.
Slashdot Mirror
> Second, it is almost as anal as Java.
FYI, engineering of any kind is an anal retentive profession. It's the underlying concept of getting things right that's anal, and the anality is inherited by any procedure or tool that supports that goal.
That's as true for a mechanical engineer as it is for a software engineer.
> My biggest peeve about Ada, which I believe MAY have been corrected since, was that it didn't directly support variable-length character strings.
As poster "Ada95" has already said, that 'feature' of Ada83 has been modified in Ada95 by the addition of two more classes of strings, bounded and unbounded.
> That's something I also hates about what's called "Standard Pascal" which makes you use fixed-length character arrays. Are we still stuck in the days of Fortran? Did these language designers never consider that one might want to perform string manipulation that resulted in a length not predicted at development time?
I agree wholeheartedly. IMO it was clever to think of a string as an array of char, but the concept was fundamentally flawed. Strings should be conceived as a natural data type with their own natural set of operations, not as a funny kind of array.
> Consider the fact that the code for the Ariane 5 rocket which crashed [eiffel.com] because of a software problem, was written in Ada.
If you search the Web you should be able to find the official report on the cause of the crash. I read it on the Web a year or two ago, but didn't bookmark it.
Short version: it wasn't the choice of language, nor even a software bug at all.
Intermediate version: For economy, the A5 engineers decided to re-use a sensor/controller hardware unit from the A4, since it and its associated software had worked flawlessly. Unfortunately, they did not review that part's specs carefully enough, because the A5's more powerful engines generated a thrust/acceleration/velocity/displacement that was outside the part's design spec. During the flight the part determined, correctly, that whatever it measured was out of range, and started dumping debug data on the rocket's control bus - exactly as it had been designed to do, but with unfortunate results when it happened in the sky rather than on a workbench.
The software worked flawlessly. The design sux0red.
> I am not trying to dispute that Ada is a good language for critical safety related software... but it is only as good as the people and methodology/process being employed.
That is indeed true. However, my experience in using Ada is that it completely eliminates whole classes of bugs by catching them at compile time, so the only bugs I get are those related to the basic algorithmic design of my program.
In general, Ada will catch things at compile time that most languages will only catch at run time, and it will catch things at run time that in most languages will only be caught if someone notices that the output is incorrect. Think about that next time you're debugging a program.
> Noway does Ada help avoid bugs by being a type cast unless your talking about the stupidest little bugs imaginable.
Unfortunately, stupid little bugs find their way into operational programs. But if you have a compiler that can catch them at compile time, they don't find their way into the operational program. End of story.
Also, notice that for a given programming team the number of stupid little bugs will be proportional to the size of the code base, and for 1.5MLOC that generally translates to a lot of stupid little bugs.
> ADA LACKS the debuggers and useability of C.
I used the VAX debugger with Ada [sic] over a decade ago. For OSS fans, there's GVD, the GNU Visual Debugger, with full Ada [sic] support. Don't let your prejudices lead you into making uninformed assertions.
(BTW, GVD supports C and C++ as well as Ada, and is designed to allow plug-ins to support additional languages, so give it a try if you're a C or C++ programmer and would like to have a visual debugger. I believe it's built on GDB, so its basic operations may already be familiar to many.)
> Its a hard painful language to use and learn and isnt as tried and true as C.
What is your unit of measure for "tried and true"?
> Also Im sure you can get 1.5 million lines into 1 million if you use C.
Are you sure about that? Ada [sic] does require rigorous type definitions, but once you've made them it often lets you program at a very high level of abstraction.
Please save the FUD for audiences that are unfamiliar with the subject matter.
> Software functionality should not be fundamentally different from hardware functionality.
Am I to understand that you are saying that software, like hardware, should only fail when it fails?
Granted, we have a software reliability crisis on our hands. But hardware isn't generally fault-free either. I've had a lot more Zip drives die on me than I've had kernel panics. And arguably a kernel is much more complex than the design of a removable disk drive.
> An algorithmic system is temporally inconsistent and unstable by nature.
That's an absurd claim. It's possible to prove correct behavior for algorithmic systems. Time is explicitly accounted for in most such proofs.
The biggest engineering difference between software and hardware is that people find software errors acceptable, or even normal, whereas they have never reconciled themselves to, say, collapsing bridges or wings falling off of airplanes. When that attitude changes we'll start seeing software that rivals hardware in reliability, not before. Most of the engineering concepts required for producing good software have been around for quite a while.
> Stonent Imagine a Beowulf cluster of whatever this story is about!
They already thought of that. You see, while they rarely mention it at air shows, the realy reason airplanes fly in formation is because those "formations" are actually high-availability clusters for their avionics software.
> That's what happens when you use ADA.
FYI, "ADA" is the American Dental Association.
You may be confusing it with the programming language, Ada, named after Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter.
Everyone knows that frequent reboots prevents crashes.
> from MSNBC: IT IS NOT yet clear whether the mice are smarter -- they were all killed soon after birth
> Um, why did they do that?
They caught them trying to take over the world.
> Now, according to the article: The 100-million-year-old skull was discovered in 1983 in Brazil
> I mean, ok, slashdot is usually a bit behind but this reaches new heights... You're 19 years late guys!
It doesn't sound so bad if you calculate that as a percentage of the dinosaur's age.
> Is anyone else getting massive requests for:
No, but I frequently emit massive requests for:> Why is it cool to think that the United States Government is out to spy on everyone and in general fuck things up?
It isn't "cool", it's a simple recognition of the facts. Did you miss the news last month when it came out that the FBI had a 2^16 page file on one of CA's uni presidents in the 70's, simply because they didn't think he was "tough enough" on liberal professors? Or the earlier revelation that they had a whopping big file on that Dangerous Enemy of the Republic, Albert Einstein?
These people have been at it so long that their primary motive for spying now is that they've forgotten how else to act.
> Slashdot views are so far to the left that they've wrapped around to those of the ultra right Montana Freemen.
What has Left-Right got to do with it? Not wanting to be spied on is "normal".
> It's almost like the US gov't has a list of things techies hate, and they're going down the list and doing each thing, just to piss us all off.
If your hypothesis is correct, we can expect to see the gov't eating vegetables pretty soon.
> Given how patent-encumbered JPEG-2000, MPEG-4 et. al. are, this will seriously interfere with open implementation of these standards. Would that that would slow their adoption....
Unfortunately, this won't slow anything's adoption, it will just keep the little guys out. The big boys will just say "you can use mine if I can use yours", essentially getting to use everything for free while raising the bar for people who can't ante up.
Encumbered standards and patent office idiocy are very popular in certain quarters. (And not because they promote innovation.)
> So, what exactly do you do at Slashdot?
I troll the Microsoft employees.
> I run Windows XP on a machine and, no joke, one day a few weeks ago I came home to a BSOD. So they say XP is more stable, but when it goes down, it goes down.
Yeah, but it goes down in a more stable sort of way than the old ones did.
> No, BSOD jokes are just another example of the "FUD" that Linux users profess to hate when it comes from Microsoft but love to spew from their own mouths. Windows 2000 and Windows XP even more so are pretty damn stable ... Spout all the anecdotal evidence that you want, but I can tell you that my Windows 2000-based laptop and desktop have not crashed once since upgrading to Professional.
<yawn>So, what exactly do you do at Microsoft?</yawn>
> * Note to yanks: this is what the rest of the English-speaking world calls that bit under the lid on the back of a sedan where luggage goes
Really? Over here we call it our "stash".
> The Blue Screech of Death. :)
Yeah, but think of what a great excuse you'll have whenever a cop pulls you over for speeding:
OTOH, when you take it in to have the sluggish performance checked you'll get a big bill for taking the engine out and re-installing it.
> Your "joke" was the first with a funny moderation on it that i saw. I would like to take the opportunity to address the rest of the slashbots and say "all the rest of the windows 98 BSOD jokes are going to suck". ... I'd like to see linux circa 1998 try and power a car.
You probably wouldn't have too look too hard to find a Linux system that hasn't been down since 1998.
> Socialism promises everything and delivers nothing, except to the elite in control.
I suppose you think it's just coincidence that so many members of the US Administration are former CEOs, boardsitters, etc.? That the US Congress is increasingly populated by people who were already rich when the got into politics? (To say nothing about being richer when they get out?)
Face it: capitalism produces ruling elites too.
> Capitalism is an inherently equal system, where any person can hold their own and even become successful purely by hard work and merit.
Actually, having a high-bandwidth connection to the Good Ole Boy Network will get you a lot further, a lot faster.
Surely even you aren't so naive as to think George Bush's business and political careers have been the result of hard work and personal merit?
(To say nothing about his military career?)
> Totalitarianism is Socialism.
I suppose you're unaware that even <hatsoff>the Good Ole USA</hatsoff> is partly socialist, by any meaningful definiton of the term.
And that's probably no coincidence: I suspect that the adoption of partial socialism is what prevented ComIntern from sweeping the west during the '30s. Indeed, it appears that the amount of socialism adopted by western democracies varies pretty much inversely with their distance from the Soviet Union.
The smart elites, regardless of their political views, make sure they hand out enough to the poor to keep armed rebellion in check; there's no advantage in losing everything just to abide by some political philosophy.
> has made a strong effort to convince the public (and rather sucessfully, given media reports) that the true source of terror is Iraq and Saddam Hussein - the old, not-quite-vanquished enemy of Bush's daddy.
I'm genuinely curious why the Old Guard is so eager to wage Gulf War II, but even more curious, IMO, is the fact that to all appearances the group that is pushing so hard for it is the same group that wants to kill the Crusader artillery system on the grounds^w excuse that "We'll never fight another heavy-metal war like the Gulf War".> Looked at from today's perspective (as the original article does), where most of these nations have constitutions that have teeth in them, it's clear that most of these governments are not capable of deploying widespread down-to-the-common-civilian "room 101"-style law enforcement
How innocent of you. Well, at least you hedge your bets by qualifying yourself with "widespread" and "down-to-the-common-civilian".
> Sure, the idea of telescreens in every home was scary, but it was just one facet of 1984. How about constant warfare to keep production levels high and boost GNP?
One of my favorite amusements these days is watching the Administration's juggling act, trying to terrify the public so it will support a very vague "war" effort and an accelerated erosion of civil liberties, and simultaneously to reassure the public that everything is A-OK, in order to drive the stock market back up. (Recent corporate scandal news has obfuscated this conflict somewhat, but it's still there if you look.)
> Keeping a high prison population is also a good waste product that boosts GNP. In the U.S. the prison population has gone from 200,000 in early 1970's to over 2 million in 2002. The majority of that is due to nonviolent drug offenders.
I wonder sometimes whether that is partly aimed at reducing the (reported) unemployment.
> Yet prison construction and technology is one of the highest growth industries in the U.S., and it's basically corporate welfare.
In some states they are going further, contracting out the administration of prison facilities to privately held corporations, as well as the construction.
It is also interesting to compare the cost of sending a citizen to college vs. incarcerating a citizen for four years, yet the public seems to be much more enthusiastic about funding prisons than they are about funding education.