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Re: Buffer access with bounds checking...

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Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> writes:
>Mark Wills <forthfreak@gmail.com> writes:
>> I also argued that a halt was useless - from the users perspective
>> (who would be some 1800 meters above the embedded device, in the
>> warmth and dryness of a nice drilling rig) a halt was a crash.
>
>If there is a buffer overrun, the result might be much worse than a mere
>crash (where the thing stops operating).  It gadget might keep operating
>while doing something completely crazy, setting itself on fire,
>whatever.
...
>Yes.  That sounds better than letting the program keep running into the
>weeds.  It's no longer under the programmer's control, so it's better to
>shut it off.

That thinking blew up the Ariane 5.  It would have been totally safe
to ignore the overflow, but the default was to do something that some
people considered better (IIRC it sent error messages on the
internal bus), probably because it's a better-defined result.

Oh, and the software in the Ariane 5 had been proven to be correct.

>Erlang is written around this idea, that software failures are
>inevitable, so there are extensive provisions for recovering from them.
>Programs are organized into isolated processes and there is a
>supervision tree that restarts crashed ones.

That sounds much more sensible for this kind of stuff than just
stopping.  OTOH, if the failover works well, the bugs never get fixed.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
     New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
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Thread

Buffer access with bounds checking... Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-08-31 06:51 -0700
  Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-08-31 11:04 -0500
  Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Alex McDonald <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2012-08-31 09:20 -0700
    Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-08-31 12:57 -0700
      Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_have@notemailnot.cmm> - 2012-08-31 18:46 -0400
        Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-09-01 04:05 -0500
          Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_have@notemailnot.cmm> - 2012-09-01 13:45 -0400
            Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-09-02 04:19 -0500
              Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_have@notemailnot.cmm> - 2012-09-02 16:15 -0400
                Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-09-04 12:02 -0500
  Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Doug Hoffman <glidedog@gmail.com> - 2012-08-31 14:15 -0400
    Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-08-31 12:56 -0700
    Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-08-31 13:32 -0700
      Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Doug Hoffman <glidedog@gmail.com> - 2012-08-31 17:45 -0400
        Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-08-31 15:07 -0700
          Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Mark Wills <forthfreak@gmail.com> - 2012-09-01 00:49 -0700
            Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-09-01 14:06 -0700
              Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-09-02 04:21 -0500
              Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-09-02 10:27 +0000
          Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Doug Hoffman <glidedog@gmail.com> - 2012-09-01 06:59 -0400
  Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... humptydumpty <ouatubi@gmail.com> - 2012-08-31 14:21 -0700
  Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_have@notemailnot.cmm> - 2012-08-31 18:48 -0400
  Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-09-01 01:41 +0200
    Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-09-01 02:37 +0200
    Re: Buffer access with bounds checking... mhx@iae.nl (Marcel Hendrix) - 2012-09-01 11:11 +0200

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