A Quote by Tony Hoare

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.

Tony Hoare

Quote Topics

Billion Call Dollar Invention Mistake Null Reference

Quote Author

Tony Hoare
British - Scientist
Born: January 11, 1934

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.

Tony Hoare

I just think dieting is something that is run by a billion dollar - a multi-billion dollar - industry that isn't always looking out for your heath. There's healthy ways to do it.

Barbie Ferreira

There's smarter people than me. But you cannot have any one guy running 18 billion-dollar businesses. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've met some extraordinary leaders in my time. They struggle with running one billion-dollar business.

Robert Scoble

[Coining phrase "null hypothesis"] In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the "null hypothesis," and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

Ronald Fisher

Right now we have a $600-billion or so Defense Department budget, but when you add in, for example, a trillion-dollar nuclear weapons program over the next decade or two, it adds significantly to it. So it's somewhere around $600 billion. We call for approximately cutting that in half and instead putting those dollars into true security here at home.

Jill Stein

Thanks to the invention of the telescope, planets that are 100 billion miles away look to be only 50 billion miles away.

John Wagner

The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure.

Robert C. Solomon

While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993.

David Souter

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

Octavio Paz

The only way Congress can get one dollar to spend is to take that one dollar from Americans, borrow that one dollar from Americans, or inflate that one dollar from Americans. So, it's very much like the visual image of a swimming pool. A person notes there is a shallow end, so he takes the water out of the deep end and pours it in the shallow end, hoping to raise the height of the water in the pool - and you would call that person stupid.

Walter E. Williams

I run a multi billion dollar company

Tito Ortiz

In business, when you can meet an unmet need that is this primal, even meeting it in a superficial way can create a multi-billion-dollar business - e.g., the chat rooms in AOL when it first came out, or the lounges in Starbucks, or the billion people who are on Facebook - even though these are hardly the most intimate of life experiences.

Dean Ornish

Again, a franchise to me doesn't have to be a billion dollar title.

David Fincher

I want people to be inspired to do what's in front of them. If you won't give a dime out of a dollar, don't talk to a billionaire about giving their money away because if you don't give a dime out of a dollar, I can promise you, you're not going to give a 100 million out of a billion. It's a lie.