On Mon, 13 May 2013 10:46:45 -0400, John Gilmore wrote:
>
>The work of Rufus Isaacs on aircraft-collision avoidance, which I have
>mentioned here before, is highly instructive. He found that the only
>safe collision-avoidance strategies for aircraft A in an air space
>also occupied by aircrafts B, C, D, . . . were based upon the
>assumption they were hellbent on colliding suicidally with it.
>
The John Madden / Isaac Asimov corollary:
If any of B, C, D, has a higher maximum airspeed and higher
operational ceiling than A, there is no safe strategy for A.
>This weekend, for the first time in a very long time, I looked at a
>stream of problem reports for a compiler. (It was a C compiler, but
>that is not important.) What struck me about them was that most of
>those that involved syntactically constructs reflected 'bizarre' uses
>of the language that would not occur to anyone who was proficient in
>it.
>
Plus those that would occur only to someone who was proficient in it.
(Or is that what you meant to say?)
>The only way to cope with such deficiencies is to generate
>syntactically correct constructs, however absurd,
>mechanically/programmatically for testing. Here, as elsewhere, malice
>and ignorance are often very difficult to disentangle.
>
Fuzz testing. Black Team.
-- gil
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