Why don't other programming languages have ranges?

[Jim Balter]

"dsimcha" <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:i2rvar$6o0$1 at digitalmars.com...
> == Quote from Don (nospam at nospam.com)'s article
>> Jim Balter wrote:
>> >
>> > "Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message
>> > news:i2nkto$8ug$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> >> bearophile wrote:
>> >>> You have to think about proofs as another (costly) tool to avoid
>> >>> bugs/bangs,
>> >>> but not as the ultimate and only tool you have to use (I think
>> >>> dsimcha was
>> >>> trying to say that there are more costly-effective tools. This can be
>> >>> true,
>> >>> but you can't be sure that is right in general).
>> >>
>> >> I want to re-emphasize the point that keeps getting missed.
>> >>
>> >> Building reliable systems is not about trying to make components that
>> >> cannot fail. It is about building a system that can TOLERATE failure
>> >> of any of its components.
>> >>
>> >> It's how you build safe systems from UNRELIABLE parts. And all parts
>> >> are unreliable. All of them. Really. All of them.
>> >
>> > You're being religious about this and arguing against a strawman. While
>> > all parts are unreliable, they aren't *equally* unreliable. Unit tests,
>> > contract programming, memory safe access, and other reliability
>> > techniques, *including correctness proofs*, all increase reliability.
>> I have to disagree with that. "Correctness proofs" are based on a total
>> fallacy. Attempting to proving that a program is correct (on a real
>> machine, as opposed to a theoretical one) is utterly ridiculous.
>> I'm genuinely astonished that such an absurd idea ever had any traction.
>
> Yea, here's a laundry list of stuff that theory doesn't account for that 
> can go
> wrong on real machines:
>
> overflow
> rounding error
> compiler bugs
> hardware bugs
> OS bugs
>
> I sincerely wish all my numerics code always worked if it was provably
> mathematically correct.

I have no idea why any rational person would think that this shows that 
correctness proofs don't increase reliability.