No real-life input looks like that
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Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2022 11:07:19 -0400
From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
Newsgroups: gmane.org.unix-heritage.general
Subject: Re: Has this been discussed on-list? How Unix changed Software.
Message-ID: <CAKH6PiWDZ82ZuNZx7ytE1g0qVzQqE_7CE3XsfKaAGumAU8SG_w@mail.gmail.com>
> (Research) Unix ... 'shipped' with zero known bugs.
It wasn't a Utopia. Right from the start man pages reported BUGS,
though many were infelicities, not implementation errors.
Dennis once ran a demo of a ubiquitous bug: buffer overflow. He fed a
2000-character line on stdin to every program in /bin. Many crashed.
Nobody was surprised; and nobody was moved to fix the offenders. The
misdesign principle that "no real-life input looks like that" fell
into disrepute, but the bad stuff lived on. Some years down the road a
paper appeared (in CACM?) that repeated Dennis's exercise.
The paper: An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX
Utilities, originally appeared in Communications of the
ACM, December 1990, this one with the comments from 2000.
Tags: quote, ойті
Authors: ag