Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!gatech!ncar!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!philabs!sbcs!root From: root@sbcs.sunysb.edu (root) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Negative Open Counts (was Re: IEEE libraries) Summary: Bugs, bugs Keywords: open counts Message-ID: <1587@sbcs.sunysb.edu> Date: 13 Sep 88 11:25:29 GMT References: <1356@percival.UUCP> <368@boing.UUCP> Distribution: na Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook Lines: 39 In article <368@boing.UUCP>, dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) writes: > In article <39822@linus.UUCP> eachus@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Robert I. Eachus) writes: > > It is not a good idea to put this stuff in any of the libraries and > begin a precedent of tolerating software bugs. We must strive for > perfection in this operating system and associated applications or > we will eventually wind up limited by our own short sightedness. > No, relying on bug free programs for correct system operation is just bad design. Bugs exist. Bugs come into existence when the OS changes. Some bugs are created when two programs play together in some unexpected way. Some bugs are created when two pieces of hardware interact in strange ways. Some bugs even show up when the base machine is changed, ie new motherboard rev. If we have relatively inexpensive ways of riding through error/bad programming conditions they should be taken. I would say that we probably don't want to get into general argument checking, but simple, fairly low rate of occurance calls can be checked: Open*/Close* operations are always good candidates for checking. People still find bugs in VMS/Unix utilities in spite of the maturity/simplicity of at least Unix applications, so expecting more of the Amiga is unreasonable. Especially given the evolving nature of the Amiga and of course lack of memory protection, resource tracking, etc. We *should* all strive for perfection. This being the real world though, when a program falls short of our ideal the machine doesn't need to put up big BLINKING RED LIGHTS that a software error occured. Bad press for the machine and silly if a few extra bytes spent doing some minimal checking could have prevented it. I sometimes get the impression that people respect an IBM PC style crash more than "Software Error - Task held" or "GURU meditation" if for no other reason than if the Amiga is smart enough to detect the condition they ask "why can't it fix it?". Anways, that opinion is based on a very limited sample set of non computer types who've used my Amiga here. > Dale Luck Boing, Inc. {cbmvax|oliveb|pyramid}|!amiga!boing!dale Rick Spanbauer SUNY/Stony Brook