Re: C.A.R. Hoare on liability

[mjsilva697@earthlink.net (Mike Silva)]

Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message news:<3D0E09BA.A492AA3D@despammed.com>...
> Tying together two recent threads,
> a quote from "The Emperor's Old Clothes":
> 
>     ... we asked our customers whether they wished us
>     to provide an option to switch off these checks
>     in the interests of efficiency on production runs. 
>     Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew
>     how frequently subscript errors occur on production
>     runs where failure to detect them would be disastrous. 
>     I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language
>     designers and users ahve not learned this lesson.

I sure don't understand this part.  It sounds as if "our customers"
were saying that, yes, we know how important it is to have checks
turned on even in production code, but, notwithstanding that
knowledge, we simply can't be trusted to leave them on ourselves, and
so we must be forced by the compiler to keep them turned on.  Very
odd!
 
>     In any respectable branch of engineering, failure
>     to observe such elementary precautions would have
>     long been against the law.

Yep!