Right. This is why Ada, which has always paid special attention to the needs of embedded systems, provides so many guarantees about what program behaviors are

Right. This is why Ada, which has always paid special attention to the needs of embedded systems, provides so many guarantees about what program behaviors are and are not allowed to cause allocations or exceptions. The upcoming Ada 2012 standard even includes versions of Ada 2005's collection classes which are allocation-free (read: pre-allocated to a size specified at creation time, and guaranteed not to perform allocation after that point). Ada's generic programming was a big influence on Stepanov's design of what became the STL (the first versions were a port of work he had done under Ada). Ironically, the Ada standards process moved so slowly that by the time Ada grew standards-mandated generic collection classes (previously this was something all vendors provided as an extension), it had time to learn the lessons of STL. (Not a knock on STL, by the way -- STL's implementors have learned a lot over the life of the standard as well.)