On 23 Aug 2008, at 23:10, Tim Newsham wrote:
I guess I didn't express my point very clearly... That C programmers apparently don't realise that a type system that's sound will give them something -- i.e. their programmer won't ever segfault. I wonder when we try to advertise Haskell if we should be saying "we can give you programs that never segfault", instead of "we have a strong type system".
By the way, the Java camp has (correctly) been touting this argument for quite a while.
As a day-time java programmer, I can say from experience that sometimes (100% pure) Java programs DO segfault. I've had it happen to me, and while you can justifiably say it's an error in the JVM somehow triggered by your program behaviour/timing, that doesn't help you very much at the time. Maarten Hazewinkel