BILLW@SRI-KL.ARPA (08/15/84)
From: William Chops Westfield <BILLW@SRI-KL.ARPA> By the way, There was an article in the latest issue of "Electronic Design" on writing "Fault Tolerant Software" that was pretty good. Some of the things they recomended included using doubly linked lists instead of singly linked lists, including checksums in data, checking for out of range conditions even when fetching operands from memory that should already be in range, and so on (in addition to more standard schemes that require some hardware assistance, like watchdog timers). They were also careful to point out the difference between fault tolerant software and fail-safe software (the latter includes the way most systems handle parity errors - you just return the system to a known state...) BillW -------