[GLLUG] Re: Booting into text mode

[Ben Pfaff]

Reza Beha <reza_beha@yahoo.com> writes:

> I once read that LaTeX is the only complex piece of
> software that has been completely debugged, and only
> because its development was frozen so that Knuth could
> get back to writing his tomes of knowledge after
> dedicating 10 years of his life to writing LaTeX.

Actually that's plain TeX, not LaTeX, which is an extension
package by Leslie Lamport et al.  But I think the biggest reason
that TeX is so completely debugged is that Knuth gives out money
to people who send him bug reports :-)

There are certainly large programs without bugs.  These do tend
to be the ones that were designed from the ground up with
correctness in mind.  Some of them have been *proven* correct,
for that matter.  The critical flight systems on aircraft tend to
fit in this category.