RE: IBM pushing Java (array bounds checking as a moral issue)

But what if shop standards are foursquare against writing programs
properly.<g>

Seriously, at 2AM it's hard to worry whether someone who worked where you do
five years ago should have done bounds checking on an array.  You generally
want to do the simplest thing possible to make the broken production job run
properly and then try to fix it right the next day.  There are lots of ways
to handle array overflow when you're designing a program; it's just nice to
have something you can do in 10 minutes in a emergency and go back to sleep.


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Coulter [mailto:shc@flybynight.com.au]
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 1999 11:45 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: RE: IBM pushing Java



Hello Joel,

Gosh, I've been busy on this topic!

You wrote:
>programs on an as needed basis.  It's really fun to handle an array
overflow
>support call at 2 AM by converting the program to RPGIV and expanding the
>array, cancelling the OPM version and then giving a retry to the CL message
>that follows. 

Of course if the program had been written properly it would be doing bounds
checking on the array index and 
would have sent a message weeks ago informing you of the approaching end of
the array (assuming the element 
usage has ben gradually increasing -- I just love those 9999 element arrays
-- we'll never fill that up!).

Even if this was just one of those things and the array simply isn't large
enough ('cause too many of whatever 
is stored were added today) it should be possible to handle the situation.
For instance, log the failed data 
to a file, send someone a message, and process the log file later --
standard transaction update problem 
handling.  Please note that this is meant for the general case.  One can
always think up specific scenarios 
where programmatically handling the error is not worth the effort.

A perfect case for dynamically allocating storage and using that for the
array.

And that CL message indicates no (or very little) exception handling is
being performed and you really don't 
want to know my opinion on that!! - even though the Cat, Dog, Rabbit, Impala
message is useful to restart the 
program.

I can see this append starting a whole war of words ...

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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