Re: Faulty languages and Liability

[Steve O'Neill <oneils@gbr.msd.ray.com>]

Hyman Rosen wrote:
> 
> Nope. That's why so many places adopted Java. They just got
> tired of the risks of using Unchecked_Deallocation in their
> Ada code.

Nice thought.  But I would bet lots of money that the primary reason
that
companies adopted Java was because that's what the rest of the herd was
doing.
Even more I would doubt that Unchecked_Anything was ever a
consideration.

The worker-bees saw it as the Next Great Thing and needed to have it on
their
resume to be viable next month. The manager-types were told that it was
better 
than sliced bread - it was cheaper, better, safer, etc., etc.  Some of
that
was likely true and some was just hype.  How you use the tool will
greatly
effect your mileage (as with any tool).

> > 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 1) there was great fear that the performance penalties might be
too
great for some applications and 2) some folks believed that they could 
sufficiently test the software to the point that such checks were
unnecessary.
In my experience neither of these are valid (at least not since the
early 80's).