Re: Ada student homework ?

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <3A10FA2A.E52FBF51@cadwin.com>,
  Nicolas Brunot <n.brunot@cadwin.com> wrote:
> Robert Dewar wrote :
>
> > A decent operating system cannot be crashed by "bad
software",
> > that is elementary. Yes, I know that Windows users get used
> > to the contrary viewpoint (after all the navy concluded that
> > the infamous NT blue screen event was due to a faulty
> > application program!!!!)
>
> I remember a thread on comp.lang.ada a few weeks ago where
someone was
> reporting a 5 lines procedure (syntaxically incorrect) where
Gnat
> crashes with Storage_Error after several minutes.
> Your answer was more or less (no kidding ... !!!)
> "This is not a bug, the compiler is just complaining it is out
of
> memory"
> No comment ...
> Well I just read a suggestion to end up this thread which
seems quite a
> reasonable suggestion



First of all, you are mischaracterizing a response of mine,
if you don't believe that, go back over the archives, I said
absolutely NOTHING of the kind.

Second of all, you don't seem to understand the point. If
GNAT or any other program, malfunctions, that is one thing.
If it takes the operating system down with it, that is QUITE
another thing.

It is the latter behavior that you seem to find quite reasonable
in the Windows environment from your previous posts, but the
point is that in a decent operating system, bad applications
software can NEVER disable the operating system.

For example in OS/2, it is extremely rare to see the system
freeze up or crash. I can only remember one instance recently
in which OS/2 froze on me, and it could well have been a
hardware problem, since the machine I am working on is old
and tired.

By the way, when OS/2 did freeze in this instance, I lost only
two keystrokes of the file I had been editing, everything else
was saved automatically.

The technology for essentialy crash-proof operating systems has
been around for decades, it just has not arrived in Redmond yet!


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