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Roger Racine <[log in to unmask]>
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 07:19:11 -0400
text/plain (37 lines)
At 01:21 AM 6/18/1999 , [log in to unmask] wrote:
>[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>>Speaking of horror stories of commercial code, i saw this today in
>>the news from the microsoft trial and laughed my ass off...
>>
>>"Felten, who examined the secret "source code" for Windows 98 under a
>>court order, said he had found 3,000 bugs marked by Microsoft
>>programmers in the portion of Windows 98 he had examined -- and he
>>had looked at only one-seventh of it."
>>
>>3000 bugs in 1/7th of the code!
>
>That was not a count of the bugs.  That was a count of the bugs that
>Microsoft knew well enough to ascribe to a particular part of the
>source code, but decided not to fix.
>
>Certainly there are many good reasons for deciding not to fix a known
>bug, especially as the release date approaches.  But 3000 of them in
>1/7 of the code seems excessive.
>

Just a guess, of course, but most (if not all) of those bugs are likely to
be spelling mistakes or other minor user interface errors that A) users
would not care much about, and B) Ada would do nothing to help.

By the way, I just learned that 2 new NASA projects (a small satellite
program and the Space Station Crew Return Vehicle) considered Ada and
rejected it in favor of C.  I asked why and was told that they thought it
would be too costly to use Ada.  It would be interesting to see the trade
studies.
Roger Racine
Draper Laboratory, MS 31
555 Technology Sq.
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-258-2489

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