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From: Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Quality systems (Was: Using Ada for device drivers? (Was: the
 Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died))
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 07:43:12 -0400
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
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Date: 2003-05-22T11:43:16+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Well, as a matter of logic, one can't prove a negative assumption. I
can't *prove* that any given operating system *won't* crash. The best
one can do is demonstrate that an operating system *does* crash.

That
said, I could point to VMS and observe that with later versions of it, I
drove it around quite extensively and had ill-behaved programs that
crashed, but they never killed the OS. Nor was it ever necessary to
reboot it periodically to clear problems. It may have been possible to
kill it, but if it could stay up and running for months on end and not
crash under a large variety of uses, this ought to be good enough for a
large variety of users.

Safety critical applications might require a much more
rigorous standard, but I'd be satisfied with a stability standard for
PC/Workstation OS's that demonstrated that you really had to work hard
to make the OS crash and that it could be up and running indefinitely
without observable problems.

MDC
 >
 >
 > I know of no operating system which does not crash because of
 > application behaviour. Some does so more seldom than others, but they
 >  still do.
 >
 >
 > greetings,
 >
 >
 >