Angelina Jolie doing ‘sexy movie hacking’ in ‘Hackers’

In the recent days, Ada has come to my attention. I had heard of the language before, but never really gotten into the knits and grits of it. I'm working on that now.

At the infancy of my OOPD project I looked into several alternative languages to Java. I recall considering C#, C++, Oberon, Smalltalk, and Go. The reason that I advocated ditching Java was the following:

public class Main
{
public static void main(String[] _)
{
System.exit(42);
}
}

This is the simplest Java program I could think of.

A disclaimer, to start it all off, in the interest of fairness and honesty: I got a review copy of the book from No Starch Press, and was asked to review it.

In UNIX there is a specific error number which can be returned from system calls. This error, EAGAIN is used by the OS kernel whenever it has a complex state in which it is deemed too hard to resolve a proper answer to the userland application. The solution is almost a non-solution: you punt the context back to the user program and ask that it goes again and retries the operation. Then the kernel gets rid of the complex state and the next time the program enters the kernel, we can be in another state without the trouble.