Re: Ada vs Fortran for scientific applications

["Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>]

robin wrote:
> Bugs can be handled in many cases.
> Standard error handling can deal with them.

Depends on what you mean by "deal with them".

If it means releasing whatever resources you believe you have control 
over and then exiting, okay.

I take a paranoid approach to bugs--I have no way of knowing what that 
bug may have corrupted by the time it gets detected.  So I'm extremely 
leery of bug handling responses that simply stop the propagation of the 
fault, and then try to resume execution.

My reasoning is that since it's a bug, some or all of its triggering 
context is inherently unknowable (if it was fully knowable, it would be 
a known possible error, e.g., network failure, and could be accommodated 
via error handling).  The application has therefore lost confidence in 
its internal state, and proceeding onward with anything short of an 
exit/verify externalities/restart strategy is proceeding at risk.

My 2c :-)

-- Marc A. Criley
-- McKae Technologies
-- www.mckae.com
-- DTraq - XPath In Ada - XML EZ Out