Phil Bouchard (24 April 2018 19:05) > I’m not sure if you read the link I posted about static analysis but a > software bug can cause billion dollar projects like space shuttles to fail. > Maybe MS Word was a bad example but they can be very costly.
The Columbia crash wasn't a (computer) software issue. One can think of the organisational failure that lead to it as a (human) software issue, but I don't think we have static analysis software for that. The closest you'll get is an ISO 9000 compliance auditor. The Ariane 5 crash was a software error, but it wasn't a memory abuse; it was using an under-sized integer to hold a value that overflowed. With luck, static analysis would find that, but it's a pointer abuse. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter involved a software bug, but it was a wrong choice of units rather than a pointer abuse. Mixing archaic silly units with sensible SI ones has caused more grief for space missions than pointer abuses. So bugs can have disastrous consequences, sure; but fixing all pointer abuses won't stop that from being the case. Meanwhile, in the world of most programmers, most bugs are more or less endurable and most users would sooner have something that ships today with a few endurable bugs than not have the software that helps them do whatever it is they do until someone is sure there are no bugs in it. Buts aren't the only thing that can cause a software project to fail. > Also it is possible for me to support nested structures by prefixing class > names so that their meta-data fits into the top-level namespace but for the > moment they’re not. But those are personal preferences like not using > underscores in function names, etc. Well, if you can support nested structures, you might have a better chance of persuading folk to port to your new language; but those with large code-bases aren't about to re-write them to eliminate nested structures just because you regard that choice as a personal preference. I note that Qt has plenty of nested structures. I'm not volunteering to refactor them away. Eddy. _______________________________________________ Development mailing list Development@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development