Re: The D Programming Language
"Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)"
<SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> writes:
There might be a terminology confusion here, which I'd like to clear
from the beginning:
1. A program "has undefined behavior" = effectively anything could
happen as the result of executing that program. The metaphor with the
demons flying out of one's nose comes to mind. Anything.
2. A program "produces an undefined value" = the program could produce
an unexpected value, while all other values, and that program's
integrity, are not violated.
The two are fundamentally different because in the second case you can
still count on objects being objects etc.; the memory safety of the
program has not been violated. Therefore the program is much easier to
debug.
Seriously?
IME you're at least likely to crash noisily close to the undefined
behavior. If you make everything defined the program necessarily
soldiers on until one of your own internal checks is able to notice
that something went wrong. Or am I missing something?
I don't have any real experience with Java, but Python generally
exhibits Java-like behavior, and I don't find it easier to debug than
C++.
--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com
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