Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: >> Java has considerably greater reputation for reliability than C or C++. > > Wonder why Sun’s licence explicitly forbade its use in danger-critical > areas like nuclear power plants and the like, then?
Probably because Sun lawyers demanded it. Is there a Sun C or C++ compiler with a license that doesn't have that restriction? Even if there is, it just means those languages are so unreliable that the lawyers felt confident that any meltdown could be blamed on a bug in the user's rather than the compiler ;-). > Let’s put it this way: the life-support system on the International Space > Station is written in Ada. Would you trust your life to code written in > Java? The scary thing is I don't know whether I'm already doing that. Life support systems have hard real-time requirements (Ada's forte) but I'd expect lots of military decision-support systems are written in Java. Maybe one of them will raise a false alert and somebody will launch a war. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list