Re: security issues with forth

Ed Beroset wrote:

Stephen Pelc wrote:
On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:26:06 GMT, Ed Beroset <beroset@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


Elizabeth D Rather wrote:

explaining clearly what the problem was. So, I said, "what about all
those error messages?" "Oh," the student would say, "I just ignore
those, I get them all the time." Crashes are instructive.

Yes, but these were students writing student exercises. I think there's
a difference between that and professionals writing code that will be
used in an actual product.


I see experienced application programmers do this all the time!

As I see it, all too often the crash dialog/dump/message is coded
by a system programmer who knows what it means - application
programmers ignore messages that are not at their level of
abstraction.

So is it your view that having the system actually crash would somehow
turn these individuals into competent professionals? I don't think it's
very likely.

Ed

I think the idea is like driving a car: a sufficient number of crashes
will weed out the incompetent. Somewhat Darwinian, to be sure, but
in the long run that is what happens anyway.

My only hesitation about the policy of "Fiat justitia, ruat caelum!" is
its effect on the innocent bystanders.

--
Julian V. Noble
Professor Emeritus of Physics

http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/~jvn/

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and
more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious
day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last
and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

--- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: security issues with forth
    ... Crashes are instructive. ... but these were students writing student exercises. ... I see experienced application programmers do this all the time! ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: Troolean operators
    ... Yes, but it crashes all the time, because the programmers, never said, ... true false or something else, they always say, true false or error out, ... bad memory assignment or whatever. ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: why the usage of gets() is dangerous.
    ... Without fat pointer and checking you get memory corruption, ... Those who bother to attach a debugger and see where it crashes will immediately know where it crashes and why. ... Most programmers also find tools that pinpoint the bugs more accurately by causing the failure to happen earlier to to be useful. ... By your argument we should not do any testing of any libraries or any SW because then it will be VALIDATED and the programmer will assume something else must be wrong when it crashes. ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: fclose(0)
    ... Some programmers never even see ... the crashes, let alone fix their causes. ... I have a web browser ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: [opensuse] frustration and suggestions
    ... It is directed at the "features galore, never mind the crashes" attitude of ... more and more "programmers". ... that is just as bad as firefox catching ... itself crashing, imo they should concentrate on eliminating the crashes, ...
    (SuSE)
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