Re: Faulty languages and Liability

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

I wouldn't imagine a court saying otherwise. What a court *might* say is
"You built lousy software knowing full well and good that techniques and
tools existed to catch/fix the errors that were brought before this
court..." Go ahead and pick whatever tools you like. If the tools you pick
don't catch the errors for you (knowing that other tools do), then you ought
to institute some other processes by which you can catch them. Now its up to
you to decide what technology you want to employ.

As a side question: Does anybody know of a list of typical C/C++ errors that
can't happen in Ada? It might be useful to do a side-by-side comparison.
(This kind of error is common in C... - This error can't happen in Ada
because...) I know Lucent had a study of common C errors & that a good
number of them couldn't happen in Ada. (Read the report years ago). Of
course the report concluded "we will institute coding standards and code
reviews..." rather than "we'll use a language that will catch these things
automatically..." - but it wasn't the point of the study to foament a
revolution.

I just think it would be instructive to have a web page comparing C/C++
errors against "Can't happen in Ada" or "Unlikely to happen in Ada
because.."

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:3D0DE5E2.5010904@mail.com...
> And we'll just conclude that it's up to the people who make
> software to decide what to use to make it.
>