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From: "Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: How Ada could have prevented the Red Code distributed denial of
 service attack.
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 08:47:54 +0200
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Reply-To: "Joachim Durchholz" <joachim.durchholz@gmx.de>
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:11742 comp.lang.c:73345
 comp.lang.c++:81478 comp.lang.functional:7459
Date: 2001-08-10T08:47:54+02:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Larry Kilgallen <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote:
> "Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de> writes:
> > Marin David Condic wrote:
> >> Failure of software is 100% due to mistakes made by the author. :-)
> >
> > Wrong. A sizable fraction is due to misunderstandings between author
and
> > customer (or whoever writes the specifications), and it's not always
the
> > author who's responsible for them.
>
> It was a mistake by the author to accept an ambiguous specification.

Or an inconsistent one, for that matter.

However, specifications are never complete. If the customer were able to
write a complete specification, he wouldn't need a programmer after all.
And it's the missing parts that give rise to the usual problems.

> If the specification is unambigous but not what the customer wanted,
> that is not a failure of the software.

Technically not, but it creates exactly the same sort of hassles as a
programmer mistake.

Regards,
Joachim
--
This is not an official statement from my employer.