> Even C crashes safely on null pointer dereference. Does it? What if you needed to clean up external resources? What if some data was left in an inconsistent

> Even C crashes safely on null pointer dereference. Does it? What if you needed to clean up external resources? What if some data was left in an inconsistent state? What if you were in the middle of writing to a file? Etc. I do agree that crashing is often the right thing to do and of course the machine can die anyway, but sometimes you want to at least attempt to recover. Also, in much of the software I've written in recent years, crashing was not acceptable because just because one thing (eg request of some kind, message, task, whatever) failed unexpectedly, does not mean that others will too and we still want others to be attempted. Sometimes you can get away with letting the program crash and then restarting it to run the other work, but often things are done concurrently and restarting would lose any in-progress state. If the work takes a long time, restarting all work because one piece failed is often unacceptable.