Re: How can my software know when a LX200 has finished slewing?

Chris L Peterson wrote: 
On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:43:27 +0000 (UTC), Pierre Vandevenne
<pierre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

While we don't use Delphi for our programs either, I am thankful "Cartes du Ciel"'s author - among others - remains unaware of the language intrinsic worthlesness ;-) 

Heck, I didn't say it was worthless- just based on a lame language that
is a pain to use. Wasn't it Turning who demonstrated just how little it
takes to solve any problem algorithmically? But just because it can be
done, that doesn't mean you necessarily want to do it in a certain way.


ITYM Turing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing-complete

But strongly typed languages are much better when lives are at stake or for mission critical systems. You can't afford to have gratuitous blue screens then. Far better to have programmers typos and common errors detected at compile time than turn it into code that is guaranteed to crash in obscure ways later. Industry chose another path. We all pay the price.

PASCAL is only one example of a family of strongly typed languages. It was imperfect. Algol68 was cute and very powerful in its day. Modula2 solved most of the flaws in Pascal and I think remains one of only a handful of languages with a full formal verified specification. Ada went beyond that but military involvement made it overly complex in the end. Ultra high reliability software now has to use a cunning subset of the Ada language.

Sadly business users prefer bloated software with huge numbers of bogus features they don't use and crashes regularly. You would be amazed how easy it is for a team of monkeys to churn out code that will get through a C compiler. I have seen far too much production C code riddled with errors that defensive static analysis tools could find (if only they were run). And to be fair C++ compilers have improved a lot in this respect. At least these days a dying MS Office Application no longer takes the OS down with it (most times). <FX: crosses fingers>

I would personally prefer to catch errors at compile time whenever possible YMMV.

Regards,
Martin Brown
.

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