C Community's Cavalier Attitude On Software Reliability

[Peter da Silva]

If you want to talk about blatantly unsafe constructs, how about ADA's use of
rendezvous as the primary (maybe only) message passing construct? The MINIX
operating system is written in C, but the biggest source of subtle bugs in the
system (from my observation of the discussions in comp.lang.minix) is the use
of rendezvous. I understand that the DoD has given up on using ADA's tasking
and switched to a hosted environment on top of VRTX partly because of this.

Then again there's the use of operator overloading to sort-of-implement object
oriented programming. "So what does `A+B' mean in this context?"

I suspect that a major reason that C bugs and Fortran bugs and Cobol bugs are
better known than ADA bugs and PL/I bugs is simply because these languages have
seen more use. A new broom sweeps pretty clean...
-- 
 _--_|\  Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter at ficc.uu.net>.
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