Re: Faulty languages and Liability

[mjsilva697@earthlink.net (Mike Silva)]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message news:<3D0E461A.8050207@mail.com>...
> Mike Silva wrote:
> > So then you're asserting that choice of language has absolutely no
> > effect on software quality?
> 
> Not no effect, but not enough of an effect to justify requiring
> under pain of lawsuit that one be used and that one not be used.

Nobody is suggesting that.  It is simply that (I repeat over and over)
using known flawed tools at some point becomes professional
negligence.  It is in most other endeavors.  Why do you resist this so
strongly?
> 
> > And you're also asserting that this is
> > the consensus opinion in the industry?
> 
> Nope. That's why so many places adopted Java. They just got
> tired of the risks of using Unchecked_Deallocation in their
> Ada code.

Ah yes, I remember all those discussions about replacing Ada with Java
well. :)
> 
> > Coincidentally, from the currently-being-discussed Hoare paper of 1980
> > (discussing such security checking as array bounds checking):
> > "In any respectible branch of engineering, failure to observe such
> > elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
> 
> I wonder why Ada compilers allow these checks to be turned off, then?

Because (a) it may not matter, or (b) it may be provable that the
checks are unneeded.  You understand that not all risks are equal, nor
all solutions identical, right?
> 
> > So, given the well-known falible nature of human programmers, if one
> > has the choice between well-known tools which perform many such checks
> > automatically, and tools which do not perform such checks
> > automatically, and if a falible programmer then uses tools of the
> > second type which contribute to a major software failure, has due
> > diligence been used?
> 
> Perhaps not in hiring that programmer. The tools in question are not
> equivalent in other aspects than safety, which is why the safe ones
> are not always chosen.

That's the cowboy approach to programming -- just don't write bad
programs!  The fact that it flies in the face of human nature, and
that programmers continue to write buggy code year after year, seems
never to sink in.  This attitude is often mentioned when our industry
is referred to as immature.

Mike