in reply to Larry Wall for President! (or at least voting systems in Perl...)

I heard a pundit say that these machines were "written in the robust C language";

Who was this "pundit" and did they say it with a straight face? Like that's some guarantee or something?! That's like saying 'the script for "Gigli" was written in the robust English language' ... so what, it still sucked.

"Robust" is one of those touchy-feely marketing words ... usually meaningless.

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Re^2: Larry Wall for President! (or at least voting systems in Perl...)
by radiantmatrix (Parson) on Nov 02, 2004 at 19:53 UTC

    It's something I heard on the radio, and I didn't catch the name of the speaker. It was, however, pretty clear that he didn't know what he was talking about, and just repeating press releases.

    An amusing comment I heard during his yammering was "these machines use encryption, eliminating the possiblity that they can be tampered with". ;-) In other words, he said a number of things that were patently false, some which were misleading, and others -- like the "C" comment -- which were correct but had nothing to do with the subject at hand!

    radiantmatrix
    require General::Disclaimer;
    "Users are evil. All users are evil. Do not trust them. Perl specifically offers the -T switch because it knows users are evil." - japhy