I am not sure what initial post means by "critical", if that means
"safety critical" then this is to be expected. Industry standards for
safety critical systems are much higher than consumer products can
achieve. For instance, SIL4 rail systems have requirements that cannot
be fulfilled by standard hardware components, designs nor languages
like C. Thinks like a pointer, a "void" variable and many other things
are very flexible but unsafe,  you are right  ADA is the language of
choice in most cases.

Now this is completely different  story if "critical"  means "mission
critical" or "time critical", etc

My  2 cents

2008/4/16, Tamas Rudnai <tamas.rudnai@gmail.com>:
> I guess noone makes a really extensive unit test except for critical
> applications where they can supply components fully tested and possibly even
> under rated to achieve better reliability. For development tools could be
> done the same with special libraries that have run-time range checking or
> more rigid compile time validators. As far as I know currently only Ada
> supports that, but I my wrong on this.
>
> Tamas
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Alan B. Pearce <A.B.Pearce@rl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > >I am sure if you read the fine print, somewhere in Microchip's (and in
> > >other manufacturers) documentation you'll find similar warnings too.
> >
> > I remember that National Semiconductor has had, for far more years than I
> > can remember, a disclaimer in their data books and data sheets that their
> > products are not for use in life support products or other critical
> > applications, without written consent from National Semiconductor. I
> > suspect
> > they were setting out to head off any possible law suit due to a medical
> > instrument malfunctioning, causing death.
> >
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Ariel Rocholl
Madrid, Spain
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