On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 02:11:58PM -0500, Jerrad Pierce wrote: > These [car and plane manufacturing] also happen to be goverment > regulated industries. People also tend to get a bit more upset when > planes fall out of the sky or lots of cars rollover.
I know of quite a few software systems whose malfunctioning has caused people to suffer injuries or even die. The RISKS forum has examples of these cases, and the numbers are not trivial. As I said earlier, what really needs definition is what we should consider commercial-grade software. Perl is one of the many languages that blurs the distinction between commercial-grade and non-commercial, by making it so easy for overeager programmers to shoot themselves in the foot. Ted
