Who decides it's an error?
I'd rather have the freedom to accidentally type
rm -r /
Than be told that I wasn't allowed by the compiler or OS.
Because, someday, I may want to pull that trigger. And as a free entity, I'll insist on that.
/johnny
Your freedom as a programmer ends the moment public safety comes into play. Airbus is finding this out the hard way, and their errors are ones of design, not implementation.
In the future, I can see people who write software that has public safety issues will be licensed, just as PE’s are a requirement for CivE’s who design public works, or EE’s who design power generation and distribution systems.
rm -r /
Than be told that I wasn't allowed by the compiler or OS.
While this has nothing to do with this thread, it does remind me of a hilarious service call I had many years ago at a beverage company... The night shift data guy at a soda bottling plant began to get a message that the root file system was running out of space. He had heard other IT people talk about how they could free up disk space by deleting the development system. So he logged on to the console as root, changed to development system directory, /dev , and then did an "rm *" .
Mark