Why don't other programming languages have ranges?

[retard]

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:02:36 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> retard wrote:
>> Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:04:53 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> That misses the point about reliability. Again, you're approaching from
> the point of view that you can make a program that cannot fail (i.e.
> prove it correct). That view is WRONG WRONG WRONG and you must NEVER
> NEVER NEVER rely on such for something important, like say your life.
> Software can (and will) fail even if you proved it correct, for example,
> what if a memory cell fails and flips a bit? Cosmic rays flip a bit?

ECC memory helps a bit and so does RAID arrays. A server might also have 2
+ power supplies with batteries. On software side you can spawn new 
processes and kill old ones. Typical low-end server hardware used to 
serve web pages doesn't have much more hardware support for reliability.

>> How the web programming world works:
>> 
>> ''I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works
>> then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're
>> leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just
>> restart apache every 10 requests.'' -- Rasmus Lerdorf
>> 
>> It it widely accepted that web applications fail often. It suffices if
>> the developers are fixing bad code eventually, but the remaining parts
>> should work reasonably well. Either a process is restarted or
>> exceptions are used to catch small error conditions so the server could
>> server *something* . I'm talking about practical web applications, not
>> X-ray machines.
> 
> It's retarded (!) to pretend that this is how one makes reliable
> systems.

I understand you meant reliable systems. But my original post was about 
real world web sites. I've been in a project where the manager told us to 
outsource development because the system written by the local workforce 
would have made it *too reliable*. If you can make the system only 20% 
more unreliable by cutting off 80% from the salaries, it's a big win. The 
idea is that since people accept a certain downtime and certain kind of 
error states for typical web sites, it's ok to have those problems. You 
just need to keep the number of bugs low enough. A 90..100% reliability 
isn't important.