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From: dennison@telepath.com
Subject: Re: Long Float Error from Gnat
Date: 1998/11/02
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Date: 1998-11-02T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <71j815$uv9$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  dewar@gnat.com wrote:

> As anyone in the compiler business will tell you, you can have thousands of
> users, and have them run all kinds of extremely complex code, and then some
> one comes along and does something amazingly simple, and you find a surprising
> bug involving something simple that never worked, and it is hard to believe
> that no one has noticed it. Actually this isn't unique to compilers, look at
> all the simple bugs that exist in Windows 95 for example, after literally
> thousands of beta testers had hammered it.

This certainly jibes with my experience. I seem to find at least 3 compiler
bugs within a week of starting to seriously use a new compiler. For the most
part they will be situations where I'm doing something weird (or illegal).
But I occasionally get some of the "there's no way this routine ever worked
for anyone" variety. It can't be a reflection on any one company, because
*everyone* seems to have the problem.

For just this reason I find Gnat very valuable. When I get a seemingly odd
result from vendor X, its really helpful to have a *second* compiler around
to run the code through. Even if that's what is *supposed* to happen, Gnat
may give me an error message I undersand better.

--
T.E.D.

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