Multiplying two shorts...

[Wayne A. Throop]

> From: cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
>> ark at alice.UUCP writes:
>> Wouldn't you rather risk having your program get the right answer
>> slowly rather than risk getting the wrong answer outright?

> [...] I find the attitude of
> "ark" execrable; this is what has produced our current bad software
> and also bad hardware.

"Thud."  Sorry, my jaw just hit the floor.  It is hard to conceive of
anybody finding ark's "attitude" anything perjorative, let long
"excrable".  Look, folks, let me clue you in.  I don't care how fast
your CPU, how clever your legions of coders and microcoders, nor do I
care how many femtoseconds can be shaved by using the software that
results upon such a CPU.  If the silly thing gets the WRONG ANSWER, it
just doesn't matter how fast it is delivered.  I simply don't need a
hyper-fast pile of junk driven by oh-so-clever bit-twiddlers telling me
that pi is 3.  (Or, to use real examples, drawing multiple copies of my
cursor, or aborting a login session because one program is ill, or
crashing a system because one program uses "too much" memory, or any
other of the "wrong answers" I am given every day in the name of
"speed").

Hmpf.

--
Nothing is impossible.  Some things are just less likely than othes.
                        --- Jonathan Winters in "The Twilight Zone"
-- 
Wayne Throop      <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!throopw