C Community's Cavalier Attitude On Software Reliability

[Bob Goudreau]

In article <8223 at hubcap.clemson.edu>,
billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu at hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,
2847 ) writes:
> > What the heck is
> > dab(1) anyway?  Are you perhaps confusing manpages for a real product
> > with manpages for locally programmed (and documented) extensions to
> > the system?
> 
>    Ask Richard D'Ippolito -- he originally posted the list to 
>    comp.lang.ada.  Unfortunately, the article has already expired
>    at my site.

So let me get this straight:  you're trotting out dab(1) as an example
of the "C Community's cavalier attitude on [sic] software reliability",
but you don't even have any idea of what dab is.  So how on earth do
you even know what language it's written in?

Not that the language matters anyway.  The following are all
*orthogonal* concepts (i.e., each may be varied independently of the
others):

1)  language used to program an application
2)  quality of design of the application
3)  presence or absence of documentation about bugs
4)  presence or absence of "flippant" remarks in the documentation

The only parameter that *does* depend (sometimes) on number 1 in the
list is:

5)  quality of implementation of the application

(But note that there are *many* more implementation decisions besides
language choice that play a far more important role in determining
quality of implementation.)

So far, you've shown us numerous strawmen that fall into categories
2, 3 and 4; none of those examples have anything to say about C (or
about any other programming language).  But you still haven't shown us
a relevant example from category 5:  an application whose quality of
implementation was lowered *solely due to the choice of C as the
programming language*.

Therefore, I ask you to take the "pep-C challenge":  either produce a
convincing number of such examples for us, or withdraw your original
statements. 

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