🚀 go-pugleaf

On 10 Oct 1995, Stephen E. Halpin wrote:

> Getting back to reality, Ive seen very complex systems built with no error
> detection capability, and when a problem occurs with a frequency of once a
> week, its a nightmare to debug.  If the application traps the error, and
> leaves behind a fairly detailed image of its state when the error occured,
> you can save literally weeks of debug time.

Core dump?!? Nah... Of course, all complex systems are hard to debug -- 
and with interaction with other software (e.g., the OS), and even the 
hardware, intermittent bugs become nearly impossible to debug. I guess 
that I have to agree that runtime checking helps a lot, but it doesn't do 
everything (sometimes -- often -- speed is more critical).

> There is also a data recovery issue that falls out of a data verification
> philosophy..  We had a document written with a very popular Word processor,
> and due to some kind of bug, that application was no longer able to read
> the file it had written.  Worse, it would outright crash rather than report
> an error, and (what would be most desirable) give you what it was able to
> read of the file so it could be transcribed to another file.

Hmmm... but would a "Runtime error 2354" be any better? In any case, 
you're at the mercy of the software vendor to fix the bug. (What can I 
say about bad software that crashes upon reading a corruped file? It's 
just plain *bad*.)

> Agreed.  But it can tell you that something went wrong, which is almost
> always better than trusting the results blindly.  I still here about how
> parity errors never happen, and yet I still see them from time to time.
> Id rather have to reenter a few numbers in the financials spreadsheet
> than have to find out three weeks later that somethings wrong, and figure
> out which bit got flipped.  It still doesnt help with coding errors (ie
> the lore of the space probe and DO2I...)

You must have a lot of memory! (From my experience, parity errors are 
more often due to some intermittent hardware problem, such as some sort 
of conflict that only manifests itself once in a long while.)

- Trung