[rjek]

Please tell me who you work for, so I know to avoid any of your products. Using BBC Basic like this terrifies me. If anything, because its total lack of type safety for anything but the simplest of values.

[meaty]

Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety.

I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms.

Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints.

Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do:

   REM win
   p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr%

   REM fail
   p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr%

The earlier has no cast, the latter does.

When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut:

http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg

[saw-lau]

Wow! Thanks for the reminder about how great NTK was. :-)

[ColinWright]

Out of interest, let me ask: Do you believe it's impossible to write safety-critical software in C?