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From: "Robert I. Eachus" <eachus@mitre.org>
Subject: Re: Ada GC (was Re: Ammo-zilla)
Date: 1999/11/12
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Nick Roberts wrote:
  
> And, as a corollary, customers need to be educated into rejecting
> software with a 'bug' in it just as diligently as they would reject any
> other product with a defect.
> 
> It would help for our respective governments (UK, US, and elsewhere) to
> produce some (not too heavy) legislation to assist in this (e.g.
> outlawing some of the more outrageous evasions of liability in typical
> software licences). Sadly, however, I think our politicians have
> undergone a physical adaptation to their habitat (whereby the brain is
> replaced by an air sac, for the more efficient generation of hot air).

   Of course, any such well meaning legislation, if framed too broadly,
would do much more harm than good.  There are large categories of
software where applying techniques appropriate to saftey-critical
real-time software would make products unaffordably expensive.  But more
important there is a class of software where Godel's Proof guarentees
that there is at least one bug--like compilers--or where Post's
Correspondence Problem prevents proof of compliance with a particular
set of requirements.

   And then there are other problems, like the halting problem, where it
is possible to provide a useful implementation, but it is not possible
to provide a correct implementation of the requirements.

-- 

                                        Robert I. Eachus

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