What's the best way to minimize the need of run time checks?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2016 07:48 pm, BartC wrote:

> On 10/08/2016 02:47, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

>> How about the difference between getting a compile-time error immediately
>> you try to compile your program, and a run-time error three quarters of
>> the way through processing a billion records, leaving your data in a
>> corrupted state?
> 
> And when it is a customer (perhaps in a different country) who is in the
> middle of running your code.

Depends on the customer, the application, and most of all, what the bug is.

In order of priority:

- bugs which threaten people's lives;
- security bugs;
- bugs that corrupt or destroy saved data or files;
- bugs that lose unsaved data;
- bugs that cause the software to do the wrong thing;
- bugs that prevent you from doing the right thing;
- presentation bugs;
- minor UI bugs which don't impact usability.


>> I love the fact that the computer on the Apollo lunar landers was
>> expected to have bugs, and was designed to automatically reboot and
>> continue the calculation that was interrupted. By memory, it rebooted
>> something like 30 or 40 times during the first moon landing.
> 
> Wouldn't the same error just recur each time? Or was this a random
> hardware error rather than logic?

http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/computer.htm

http://www.klabs.org/history/apollo_11_alarms/eyles_2004/eyles_2004.htm



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.