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From: Tim Pierce <twpierce+usenet@mail.bsd.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: Theory #51 (superior(?) programming languages)
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Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 19:56:34 GMT
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In article <32E6CA6E.45B5@netright.com>,
David Hanley  <david_nospam@netright.com> wrote:

>Tim Pierce wrote:
> 
>> How silly to imagine that a variable type entitled `int' might
>> actually be related to the ring Z.
>
>	It might seems silly, but I seem to remember it as part of the required
>computer science classes at my university, and pretty much everyone got
>it.  If someone can't be bothered to learn basic language 'stuff' I
>don't know how much I trust them as programmers.

Maybe I'm getting a bit off the point.  The real problem doesn't
strike me as one of ignorant programmers not *knowing* that
overflow can occur (although in practice that is a legitimate
concern).  The problem is that the programmer needs to worry about
it at all, and that the language itself does not provide for a
convenient facility for dealing with such error conditions.

In some contexts that's undoubtedly a feature, but not in the
context of writing mission-critical user-level applications.
Forcing the programmer to make a manual check for overflow every
time a calculation is made makes for wasteful and inefficient
development.

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