
Students Guide to Information
Technology
Software reliability
The languages we have discussed so far are called procedural
languages, because they involve writing down the procedures (lists
of steps) that we wish the computer to carry out to achieve our
requirements. This type of language involves a considerable risk of
programming errors, as fallible human programmers find it very
difficult to get such procedures 100% correct. These errors (or
bugs)
lead to huge delays in implementing programs, and add
enormously to the time and the cost required to produce software.
Look at the following statistics, which illustrate the seriousness
of th