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".
That would be overpromissing. You can definitely get segfaults in Haskell. The obvious example being
but many less contrived and more unexpected examples arise naturally (unfortunately).
By the way, the Java camp has (correctly) been touting this argument for quite a while.
I'd be interested to see your other examples -- because that error is not happening in Haskell! You can't argue that Haskell doesn't give you no segfaults, because you can embed a C segfault within Haskell. Bob