Queue cleanup

[Paul Rubin]

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes:
>> Java has considerably greater reputation for reliability than C or C++.
>
> Wonder why Sun’s licence explicitly forbade its use in danger-critical
> areas like nuclear power plants and the like, then?

Probably because Sun lawyers demanded it.  Is there a Sun C or C++
compiler with a license that doesn't have that restriction?  Even if
there is, it just means those languages are so unreliable that the
lawyers felt confident that any meltdown could be blamed on a bug in the
user's rather than the compiler ;-).

> Let’s put it this way: the life-support system on the International Space 
> Station is written in Ada. Would you trust your life to code written in 
> Java?

The scary thing is I don't know whether I'm already doing that.  Life
support systems have hard real-time requirements (Ada's forte) but I'd
expect lots of military decision-support systems are written in Java.
Maybe one of them will raise a false alert and somebody will launch a
war.