🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BILL.90Feb27143004@hcx2.ssd.harris.com> bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) writes:
>In article <9790@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> gb@cs.purdue.EDU (Gerald Baumgartner) writes:
>   I received the following on AT&T's famous bug (and have deleted multiple 
>   forwarding headers):
>   | | In the switching software (written in C), there was a long
>   | | "do . . . while" construct, which contained
>   | |    a "switch" statement, which contained 
>   | |       an "if" clause, which contained a
>   | |          "break," which was intended for
>   | |       the "if" clause, but instead broke from
>   | |    the "switch" statement.
>           Again it looks like this bug wouldn't have occurred in another
>           programming language.
>I can't resist saying that this last statement seems to me to be utter
>nonsense.  What programming language (read, compiler) can read the
>programmer's mind and tell what he meant?

The problem of course is that the language allows unmarked branches.
If the language forced all "goto-like" structures to have alphanumeric
labels then this error could not have occurred in the way that it did.
Obviously, if the programmer gives the wrong branch target then the 
compiler cannot help.  On the other hand, the language should probably 
use different keywords for "breaking" out of each kind of flow-control
structure, so that the programmer would have to not only give the wrong
label, s/he would also have to give a label that was in use in a structure
of the same type.   This type of error should be far easier for the 
reviewers to identify since it is then an obviously incorrect branch.

>Use of an inappropriate language is no excuse for abandoning other techniques
>of good software engineering.  >Bill Leonard

Yup....  But that is certainly not a justification of the use of
programming languages that allow such errors to occur without any
justifying increase in power or clarity....
-- 
John D. McCalpin - mccalpin@vax1.acs.udel.edu
		   mccalpin@delocn.udel.edu
		   mccalpin@scri1.scri.fsu.edu