It's Time to Abandon Insecure Languages

[jamesd at echeque.com]

    --
On 20 Jul 2002 at 13:41, Ben Laurie wrote:
> E is interesting for far more reasons that just buffer overflows 
> - in particular, it is capabilities from the ground up. Not to 
> mention highly cool for distributed applications.

It seems like a really brilliant concept if it works, a solution 
to the presently unsolved problem of distributed computing.

However I have a suspicion that instead of the presently 
intolerable problem of bugs resulting in rare, non deterministic 
deadlocks, we will get the problem of bugs resulting in rare, non 
deterministic catch probs.

With E, as with C, we get multithreaded code executed in non 
deterministic order.  It appears to me that it still happen that a 
certain rare and unusual execution order can reveal a bug, the bug 
being of the form that if G is executed before Y is executed,
which normally never happens, then the "when" clause for X can
never be executed until the "when" clause for Y is executed, but
the "when" clause for Y can never be executed until the "when"
clause for X is executed -- the old familiar multithreading
problem that has destroyed so many projects and careers. in a new
and slightly different guise.

Is there some feature of the syntax or error handling of E that 
prevents one writing such code, or reliably detects the error if 
one does write it? 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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