C Community's Cavalier Attitude On Software Reliability

Steve Spicer spicer at apollo.HP.COM
Tue Mar 6 08:58:00 AEST 1990


This 'discussion' sometimes seems more suited for alt.comp.religion than
anywhere else.  Therefore...

Mr. Wolf, I'd love to give up C and learn a new language, so please
name one for which the following statement is true:
"If it compiles, it must be correct."  Don't bother with C, Ada, Modula-2,
Pascal,FORTRAN,COBOL,Lisp,Prolog,Basic, or PL/1 -- I've seen programs
in each where the compiler did what the programmer said instead of
what the programmer meant.  I've blamed lousy training, lousy
documentation, lousy specs, and occasionally not enough sleep, but I
have NEVER blamed the language for my own shortcomings.

Steven Spicer



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