Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Integer overflow is defined to panic in debug builds, and either do that or two's compliment overflow in release builds. The current implementation overflows. However, zero is not false.


I assume that treating 0 as false was intentional in this case (it probably was written in PDP-11 ASM) and a direct translation of the Therac code therefore would be

  if counter > 0 {
      deploy_radiation_shield();
  }


Yeah, you'd certainly have to see the actual code to be sure, I bet you're right.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: