Why don't other programming languages have ranges?

[dsimcha]

== 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.