Re: Faulty languages and Liability

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@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.

> 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.

> 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?

> 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.