Royal Pain

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

> On June 18, 2004 07:27 am, James Knott wrote:
> 
> > And of course, it's impossible to prove there are no bugs. =A0You can only
> > fail to find some.
> 
> While you may be correct that it's impossible to prove the lack of bugs it =
> is=20
> perfectly possible to say with confidence "there are no bugs".  For example=
> ,=20
> I would say there are no bugs in this code ...
> 
>   #!/usr/bin/perl
>   print "Hello world!\n";

Actually, we can't be certain that the system running that code has no
bugs, because we cannot be certain that all the layers below are
"right."

Obvious such layers include:
 - Perl implementation
 - GLIBC
 - Linux kernel

"Perfection" can only take place if you have confidence that there are
no bugs in _any_ of those layers.  All three of the layers I named are
more or less "a little squirrelly" as they are pretty big, pretty
complex, and have a history of having some bugs found in them.
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