Re: What I miss... (really C, Ada, religion)

[ludemann@ubc-cs.UUCP (Peter Ludemann)]

In article <272@graffiti.UUCP> peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I'd like to re-ask my question. What do you do in a finished product in a
>high-risk environment when an unanticipated bug (anticipated errors will have
>been dealt with in both languages if the programmer is worth his pay) occurs?

It's all quite simple.  I assume you're working in a multi-tasking
environment.  There's a parent task which starts up a family of
child processes.  The parent then does nothing but wait for a child
to die.

When a child dies, the operating system puts some information into
a log about the cause of death, sends a death message to the process's
parent and tidies up all the resources owned by the dead process.
Most likely, the parent, on receipt of the death message, just 
starts up a new child process.

Every so often, people come and read the error log to see if anything
has been going wrong.  Nobody (except programmers) ever sees 
"array subscript error at line 123 in procedure xyz".  And NEVER does
one see "bus error - core dumped" as some well-known systems do.
The user will probably only see a temporary degradation in the
performance of the system - which is much better than the system
going completely flakey because one process has gone outside an
array and clobbered something.
-- 
-- Peter Ludemann
	ludemann@ubc-cs.uucp (ubc-vision!ubc-cs!ludemann)
	ludemann@cs.ubc.cdn  (ludemann@cs.ubc.cdn@ubc.mailnet)
	ludemann@ubc.csnet   (ludemann%ubc.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA)