Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:26503 comp.software-eng:3023 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.software-eng Subject: Re: C Community's Cavalier Attitude On Software Reliability Message-ID: Date: 27 Feb 90 13:07:28 GMT References: <8147@hubcap.clemson.edu> Sender: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 13 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. . / \ \_.--._/ Xenix Support -- it's not just a job, it's an adventure! v "Have you hugged your wolf today?" `-_-'