3 ms·

I shot myself in the foot yet I don't blame the manufacturer for not putting a safety on the gun since I'm the one that bought it with full knowledge of the cav

I shot myself in the foot yet I don't blame the manufacturer for not putting a safety on the gun since I'm the one that bought it with full knowledge of the caveats

teraflop 9y ago
If thousands of people were repeatedly making the same mistake, and frequently shooting other innocent bystanders' feet, I would definitely put some blame on the manufacturer.
- corndoge 9y ago
  the parents analogy is quite bad since C doesn't shoot you in the foot unless you pull the trigger closer to a gun without a safety, which plenty of manufacturers sell
simonh 9y ago
That doesn't mean that gun is well designed or worth buying and using. Criticising the lack of such a valuable or even essential feature and advising people not to use it would be fair comment. Right?
- corndoge 9y ago
  never said C was a great language, merely indicated that it's important to distinguish between a mistake made by a programmer and a failure of the language pretty sure trusting user provided data without validation is the programmers fault regardless of language
sbierwagen 9y ago
You consented to it, sure. This bug affected millions of phones. It's more like a car manufacturer decided to put a particular explode-y gas tank in a car, because it provided greater performance.
- corndoge 9y ago
  and they put a note in the manual that says "if you drive over 70mph on a hot day it will definitely explode so don't do that" so if you buy that car and you do that, it's your fault regardless of how poor the car design is
  - MaulingMonkey 9y ago
    There's likely to be a government mandated recall if your car "spontaneously" explodes - some designs are so poor they fail to meet entirely reasonably regulatory standards. Burying the lede in the fine print is not a get out of jail free card for obvious reasons.
MaulingMonkey 9y ago
My experience is that most C programmers don't know about many of the caveats about the C programming language. Are you aware that atoi("a"); is undefined behavior? It can crash, it can launch nethack, it can return 0.
- corndoge 9y ago
  yes I'm aware that parsing a letter as an an integer is undefined behavior, it's in the manual
  - MaulingMonkey 9y ago
    > yes I'm aware that parsing a letter as an an integer is undefined behavior Excellent! > it's in the manual It's not in MSDN: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yd5xkb5c.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yd5xkb5c.aspx It's not in the manpages: https://linux.die.net/man/3/atoi https://linux.die.net/man/3/atoi Cppreference understates it has having an undefined return value, rather than undefined behavior outright: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/atoi http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/atoi Tutorialspoint defines the behavior as returning 0, and fresh2refresh makes no mention of undefined behavior. My eighth google hit for atoi finally, finally, gets it right: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/atoi.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/at... If you buy or pirate a copy of e.g. the C89 standard, or refer to one of the free draft versions, it's of course properly documented there too. Neither shows up in the first 50 google results, naturally. And, of course, by google result 9, we're back to square one - incorrectly defining the behavior as being "returning 0": https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/stdlib.h/atoi https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/stdlib.h/atoi

I shot myself in the foot yet I don't blame the manufacturer for not putting a safety on the gun since I'm the one that bought it with full knowledge of the caveats

teraflop 9y ago

If thousands of people were repeatedly making the same mistake, and frequently shooting other innocent bystanders' feet, I would definitely put some blame on the manufacturer.

corndoge 9y ago
the parents analogy is quite bad since C doesn't shoot you in the foot unless you pull the trigger closer to a gun without a safety, which plenty of manufacturers sell

simonh 9y ago

That doesn't mean that gun is well designed or worth buying and using. Criticising the lack of such a valuable or even essential feature and advising people not to use it would be fair comment. Right?

corndoge 9y ago
never said C was a great language, merely indicated that it's important to distinguish between a mistake made by a programmer and a failure of the language pretty sure trusting user provided data without validation is the programmers fault regardless of language

sbierwagen 9y ago

You consented to it, sure. This bug affected millions of phones. It's more like a car manufacturer decided to put a particular explode-y gas tank in a car, because it provided greater performance.

corndoge 9y ago
and they put a note in the manual that says "if you drive over 70mph on a hot day it will definitely explode so don't do that" so if you buy that car and you do that, it's your fault regardless of how poor the car design is
- MaulingMonkey 9y ago
  There's likely to be a government mandated recall if your car "spontaneously" explodes - some designs are so poor they fail to meet entirely reasonably regulatory standards. Burying the lede in the fine print is not a get out of jail free card for obvious reasons.

MaulingMonkey 9y ago

My experience is that most C programmers don't know about many of the caveats about the C programming language. Are you aware that atoi("a"); is undefined behavior? It can crash, it can launch nethack, it can return 0.

corndoge 9y ago
yes I'm aware that parsing a letter as an an integer is undefined behavior, it's in the manual
- MaulingMonkey 9y ago
  > yes I'm aware that parsing a letter as an an integer is undefined behavior Excellent! > it's in the manual It's not in MSDN: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yd5xkb5c.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yd5xkb5c.aspx It's not in the manpages: https://linux.die.net/man/3/atoi https://linux.die.net/man/3/atoi Cppreference understates it has having an undefined return value, rather than undefined behavior outright: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/atoi http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/atoi Tutorialspoint defines the behavior as returning 0, and fresh2refresh makes no mention of undefined behavior. My eighth google hit for atoi finally, finally, gets it right: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/atoi.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/at... If you buy or pirate a copy of e.g. the C89 standard, or refer to one of the free draft versions, it's of course properly documented there too. Neither shows up in the first 50 google results, naturally. And, of course, by google result 9, we're back to square one - incorrectly defining the behavior as being "returning 0": https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/stdlib.h/atoi https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/stdlib.h/atoi