Shipping bogus code (was: Re: prototypes required ?)

[Martin Minow]

In article <1990Oct24.164257.20928 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu
(Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <18632 at rpp386.cactus.org> jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II)
writes:
>>I think Henry is being equally naive - if a vendor were required to fix
>>every last bug prior to shipping a new release, we'd still be running on
>>ENIACs...

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  In the 1960's worked for several years on
a grandchild of Einiac (Eniac > Besk > Trask) that had a totally bug-free
Algol-60 compiler (with prototypes and all).  Rumor was that it had been
written by E. Dijkstra.

>Shipping an imperfect product is inevitable.

I respectfully disagree with my esteemed collegue.  Perhaps more importantly,
I worry that it is dangerous to accept "inevitable imperfection" as it
does not set a suitable goal for system/compiler/application developers.
The problem is, however, that bug-free code is often invisble (my digital
watch is bug-free, but I don't think of it as "software.")

Martin Minow
minow at bolt.enet.dec.com