In news:oLSPh.494$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe1-gui.ntli.net timestamped Sun, 01 Apr
2007 18:22:12 GMT, ChrisQuayle posted: "[..]How can you make any comparison if you have no knowledge of the standard. [..]"
You do have a point that this certainly limits my ability. I am however aware that C without MISRA is unsafe and full Ada is unsafe and that full Ada is not nearly as bad as full C. True, one could argue that a subset of C could be safer than some subset of Ada. However, some restrictions (such as requiring no dead (never reachable) code in a switch statement) can not happen in Ada, so I am not convinced that starting by placing restrictions on something which was far less suitable as a starting point is a good approach.
" To put this into perspective, it costs only approx 10.00 uk pounds,"
That is a pretty sane price.
" less that you would pay for [..] beers."
As I am responsible, the price of the MISRA C standard is infinitely times more than I would pay for such poison that impairs the faculty of prudent judgment, impaired to such an extent that people are not able to safely drive cars with MISRA C. Have I detected the reason you are so defensive of MISRA C?
" Isn't such an effort worth something in terms of professional development ?."
Yes, but ultimately I really doubt that the greatness of Ada will be unproven by MISRA C and Ada is fit for purpose and I own hundreds of monetary units' worth of other books for my professional development which I do not have time to read promptly.
"In any case, your logic is flawed. It doesn't follow that because one object in a class of objects is available at no cost, all the rest of the objects in that class should be free, which in effect is what you are arguing."
True. MISRA C contains something worth hiding, and charging money for it is one way to deter people from it. Or should I mention that my pro-C++ tutor does not wave around a bought copy of the C++ standard when saying that he hoped that I would inject C++ into our code?
The MISRA C standard may cost money for a valid reason. I have a valid reason to use another standard instead without needing to pay for it. If I needed to pay for some standard, I could, if I needed it (e.g. VHDL (though actually I think that some of the VHDL ex-standards and maybe the VHDL standard eventually became free on the ludicrously inadequate and usually not gratis IEEEXplore)), but in the MISRA C versus Ada debate I see nothing to convince me that MISRA C is worthwhile and that being the case, it is not a good advertisement for spending money on it.
"> I am paid entirely by taxes as a researcher, so of course all of my
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kIf you are a researcher, perhaps you would care to comment further on the outrageous charges for online research reports these days, both current and historical. Much of the work originally funded by the taxpayer, but being openly sold at prices that make them inaccessable to all but well heeled individuals or large organisations. $25 to $50 per report, or several thousand dollars per annum is not unusual, for stuff that has already been paid for. The results of publicly finded research should be available at cost to anyone who wishes to access it, but that's far from the case now. [..] a greedy, grasping attitude.
[..]"As I made clear, the greed and unaccountability and secretiveness of researchers is a disgrace. I do not restrict this complaint to "online research". I do not really seem to have anything else to say about that.
"[..]
[..] C++ may have a role for consumer electronics applications, where recovery is usually power off and reboot, but is it really ready or appropriate for mission critical work ?..."I do not know whether this is really true, but in the so-called Republic of Ireland I shockingly heard of one deployed (and not recalled) life-critical embedded medical software product which is very crash prone, but which is designed to have a very quick reboot time (far less than one second) such that it is expected that crashing does not make the product unsafe. The person who claimed this said that for his own work (business-critical but not life-critical and not medical), he similarly does not bother to design his software so well that it will not crash frequently, and that he tries to have data structures in such a way that they are resilient to corruption from crashes.