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On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 17:31 -0800, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 5:06 PM
> > To: Daniela Florescu
> > Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> > Subject: RE: [xml-dev] The Airplane Example (was Re:
> > [xml-dev] StreamingXML)
> >
> > Hmm. Actually the link you provided does corroborate your
> > claim that it was a type error. I could have sworn that the
> > last time that crash came up in such debate, that I looked up
> > and found that it was a units conversion error instead. I
> > don't have the time to repeat such a search, so I'll accept
> > this as a valid counter-example. I still stand by my own
> > statement that I've never suffered such software failure, and
> > I find it extraordinary that someone did in this case.
>
> I've had these error occur in my code after multiple refactorings of
> infrequently excercised code paths. I also used to make the same claim
> as you but was finally bitten a few months ago.
Heh. Maybe I'm just living a time bomb, then :-)
But given how many oodles of bugs that I *have* produced of the value
variety, even if I were to be suddenly bitten by an unmistakeable type-
bug, I'd would still seem to me that strongly, statically typed systems
solve 2% of problems at a disproportionate cost.
And just to clarify my "extraordinary" in the above sentence, it's not
so much that I think of type bugs as completely mythical beasts, it's
more my amazement that a single type-bug (or really any individual bug)
could bring down such an aerospace system, since as we all know (and has
been beaten to death in this thread), such systems typically build in
layers and layers of redundancy.
--
Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com
Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html
Full XML Indexes with Gnosis - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/08/py-xml.html
Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286
UBL 1.0 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think28.html
Use Universal Feed Parser to tame RSS - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipufp.html
Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html
A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/
The State of Python-XML in 2004 - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/10/13/py-xml.html
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