&gt;  Such is the state of software engineering.<p>Yes, as Hoare stated in 1981, regarding Algol design:<p>&quot;The first principle was security: The principle that every syntactically incorrect program should be
rejected by the compiler and that every syntactically correct program should give a result or an
error message that was predictable and comprehensible in terms of the source language program
itself. Thus no core dumps should ever be necessary. It was logically impossible for any source
language program to cause the computer to run wild, either at compile time or at run time. A
consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted
variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared
bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide
an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs.
Unanimously, they urged us not to - they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on
production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that
even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. <i>In any respectable branch
of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the
law.</i>&quot;