[Gllug] [OT] Appreciation

[Nix]

On 16 Dec 2006, Tethys spake thusly:

>
> "Juergen Schinker" writes:
>
>>there is never a guarantee that your app is gonna run forever
>
> Sure there is. Short of hardware failure, what would stop my
> app from working? I'd hate to be responsible for a system where
> software just stopped working for no apparently good reason...

Hah. The *real* standards geeks think of these things.

On 17 Nov 2004, Robert Dewar said:
> Reminds me of a famous exchange in the discussion of Algol-68
> semantics at one meeting. Someone asked Charles Lindsay what
> undefined meant. He replied that it could mean anything, up
> to and including "unimaginable chaos". Geerhardt Goos then
> enquired (in a rather emphatic manner) "But how can I implement
> unimaginable chaos in my compiler?") :-)
> 
> 
> One interesting paragraph in the Algol-68 report specifies that
> at any point in the execution of the program, further elaboration
> of the program can be "interrupted", and that if such an
> interrupt occurs, further semantics are undefined.
> 
> 
> Sounds a bit drastic, until you learn that the paragraph derived
> from a discussion of what the situation was if an earthquake
> occurred during the execution of a program, causing the
> computer to be destroyed. Operating in a formal mode, the
> committee decided that they could not have a specification
> that would require conforming compilers to ensure against
> the possibility of earthquakes :-)

Now that's paranoia. :)

-- 
`He accused the FSF of being "something of a hypocrit", which
 shows that he neither understands hypocrisy nor can spell.'
   --- jimmybgood
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