[fpc-pascal] A question or two regarding the FPC

[Giuliano Colla]

See the follow up of this thread in fpc-other

Giuliano

fpclist at silvermono.co.za ha scritto:
> Hi Graeme
> 
> You have a point.
> 
> About two months ago, I had to visit the dentist because one of my filings was 
> playing up. The diagnosis was that an old silver filing was leaking and 
> needed to be replaced. Becase of all the hype about mercury poisoning caused 
> by silver filings (which from my knowledge silver filings contains basically 
> silver nitrate), the dentist suggested using an inlay which is made of some 
> composite plastic etc.
> 
> I agreed and a mobile PC on wheels was rolled in by his nurse. I noticed the 
> familiar green start button on the bottom left corner of the screen and asked 
> what version of Windows XP this box was running. The dentist's reply was that 
> this was a special version of windows specifically designed to run medical 
> related critical software. Not being an offensive character, I gave him the 
> benefit of the doubt. While he was attempting to start the 'tooth profiling' 
> program, he clicked on a tab on the taskbar and up popped MS Solitare! 
> Obviously this medical box was trying to pay for itself in more ways than its 
> intended use.
> 
> To cut a long story short, during the three dimensional scan of my tooth, the 
> Windows box blue screened. After a reboot, it worked fine until the tooth 
> inlay cutting process, where the program controls a milling machine. The 
> milling process takes close to half an hour to complete, and half way through 
> the milling process, yes you guessed it, the controlling program crashed in 
> Windows. I remarked that the inlay would now be useless, but the dentist's 
> reply was "no, it's okay, it happens quite often. Just can't restart the 
> program or the milling will stop".
> 
> When I peeked at the back of the Windows box, I was quite surprised to find a 
> Siemens logo!
> 
> Also, a few weeks later, my inlayed tooth required a root treatment.
> 
> IMO, A good programmer using FPC and Linux will produce a more stable product 
> than the same programmer using anything (MSVS, Delphi, DotNet, whatever) and 
> running in Windows. By the way, I have nothing against MS or Windows. I think 
> that MS has done a pretty good job since NT4, mostly thanks to Dave Cutler 
> and his team (ex Digital VMS OS architect - is that why NT was more stable 
> than 95, cause it's based on Unix?). Apart from poorly written software, 
> poorly written device driver are the major cause of Windows OS crashes. Of 
> course viruses and trojans etc don't help either.
> 
> Anyway, In my opinion and experience, I think that Free Pascal is suitable for 
> mission critical work and yes the system as a whole must comply. The OS, the 
> hardware the software. Redundancy must also be factured in. Most embedded 
> device have a hardware watchdog that will reset the device when required.
> 
> Signing off,
> Nino
> 
> //-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> On Saturday 09 May 2009 10:08:50 Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
>> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 12:24 AM, "Vinzent Höfler"
>>
>> <JeLlyFish.software at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> Actually, you should answer one simple question for yourself: If your
>>> life really depended on the system, would you still trust it?
>> In that case we should all be very worried. Many critical systems out
>> there run on Windows - we as technical people know that Windows is not
>> the most stable platform out there.  :-)
>>
>> The basic question is: Can we fully trust computers?  NO - but we have
>> to unfortunately. Computers are built up of many components. We have
>> no idea how well those components have been tested and simply have to
>> trust that sufficient testing has been applied. The software compiler
>> is just one of those many components.
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>   - Graeme -
>>
>>
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-- 
Giuliano Colla

Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong (O. Wilde)