Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:48:42 -0700, Walter Bright wrote: > Jim Balter wrote: >> You're being religious about this and arguing against a strawman. While >> all parts are unreliable, they aren't *equally* unreliable. > > They don't have to have equal reliability in order for redundancy to be > very effective. > > >> Unit tests, >> contract programming, memory safe access, and other reliability >> techniques, *including correctness proofs*, all increase reliability. > > True, but the problem is when one is seduced by that into thinking that > redundancy is not necessary.
I give you one use case where I really appreciate exceptions instead of segfaults: I've just spent 8 hours encoding a video file on my home computer. The job gets done and my wife wants me to start playing it in 25 minutes (it takes 15 minutes to burn the video to a cd/dvd). 250 guests are waiting for me, I'm in my son's wedding. I have very little time to save the results. Now, the save file dialog has a bug when the target file system has too little space. I want it to save the work SOMEWHERE. It should NOT just crash! I'd donate my kidney to keep the software running without problems. People typically buy Apple's computers in these kinds of situations for a good reason. PC is just too unreliable and the Windows/ Linux developers have an unproductive mentality. I don't have time to encode it twice, redundance makes no sense.
