Re: status of PL/I as a viable language

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Preben Randhol wrote:
> Which was the correct thing to do!

I believe that if the error had gone undetected instead
of handled, the rocket would have flown properly.

> Heating it until it starts to burn?

With toasters, that's actually a fine mode of operation.
You begin to smell the toast overheating, and you go and
manually release it. A little scraping if necessary, and
then you munch away.

> I guess one see buffer overruns as a limited problem to
 > the computer that was broken into?

I've already said that things like this are situational.
If you're worried about security then you have to deal
with these kinds of problems differently and then the
most stringent runtime checks are appropriate because
you would rather abort than be compromised. But no one
is sending deliberately malformed strings to a toaster
or a rocket.