> (Admittedly in the days when minis such as the HP-21MX and LSI-11 or
> micros such as the Z80 and 8088 couldn't be trusted to time their own
> memory and IO fetches correctly, and dropped things on the floor on a
> regular basis.  Things are a little better now, but why should we
> depend on it?)

"Because things are so much better now that the chance of a bug in the
checking code causing trouble is higher than the chance of the hardware
failing", perhaps?

I don't know whether that's actually *so*, mind you.  But it seems to
me to be a stance that at least warrants consideration.

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