Re: yet another Amaya bug

Am Freitag, 23. Juni 2006 14:48 schrieb Irene Vatton:
> [...]

> > While I really appreciate your work on Amaya, I'd also appreciate if
> > Amaya wouldn't contain such a plenty of bugs.  Why are bugs like the one
> > I just described so frequent in Amaya?  Is this because of using a
> > programming language which makes accidental illegal memory overwriting
> > easy or is there a different reason?
>
> Sorry if Amaya contains bugs. It's a large code (about 619,000 lines) with
> plenty possible different use cases.
> Some use cases are not imagined and then not correctly supported.
> Whatever the programming language used, all use cases must be programmed to
> make the software enough robust.

Yes, but if bugs have their roots in accidentally overwriting memory, than 
they can only happen if the programming language “supports” accidental 
overwriting of memory like C does.  If a bug causes Amaya to behave very 
differently from what's normal (like marking text and putting the cursor at 
the beginning of the document when pressing a cursor key), I suppose that 
something got really messed up internally.  This causes me to guess that some 
data structures were accidentally overwritten because of buffer overflows and 
friends.

Anyway, thanks for keeping the work on Amaya going.  As I mentioned earlier, I 
see a clear potential of Amaya to be used as a DocBook XML/MathML editor, and 
I'd be very glad to have such an editor.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang