From Richard Day
In response to Kae Verens’s letter (2 September, p 18), I feel I must point out that the letter from me he was commenting on (12 August, p 18) seemed to be edited such that it did not entirely represent the point I was making.
My original email stated: “The fact is that buffer-overflow bugs are an embarrassment and any programmer who allows such a bug to appear in their code should be ashamed of themselves. They are akin to a surgeon not sewing up a patient after an operation.”
I was not referring to all programming bugs when using the surgeon analogy, only the buffer-overflow bug. Verens is entirely correct that it is almost impossible to find and fix all bugs, but the software industry (myself included) must not fall into the thinking that software bugs are acceptable and that we should find ways around them instead of fixing them.
Burnley, Lancashire, UK
