Another Position Paper on Fairness

Software Engineering Notes | , Vol 13(3)

This is a more traditional response to Dijkstra’s EWD 1013 (see [79]). We point out that Dijkstra’s same argument can be applied to show that termination is a meaningless requirement because it can’t be refuted by looking at a program for a finite length of time. The real argument in favor of fairness, which we didn’t mention, is that it is a useful concept when reasoning about concurrent systems.