On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 09:00:55PM -0400, Mark Eichin wrote: > > > language. C is made for programmers who know what they are doing. > > No, C is made for researchers who wanted a simple way to write code > that worked on two or three different machines. To quote K&R: "Nevertheless, C retains the basic philosophy that programmers know what they are doing." And C is portable, fast and flexible. It's just a little bit higher leven than assembly. > The fact that it has been pushed so far (granted, with help from POSIX > to nail down the "creative" things various vendors did to it to make > it usable, like prototypes) I guess you mean ANSI here. > is a tribute to the ingenuity of some, and > the stubborn persistence of many more. That doesn't make it a *good* > thing. I think the C language is a pretty good thing. The problem is that people try to use it for things it isn't made for. And maybe it is just getting a bit old. > As has been pointed out, many languages (insert standard Ada95 > rant here, not just "scripting" languages) make the set of problems > libsafe fixes go away *by definition*. You simply can't express the > kind of error they imply, and you don't need to be able to. (Sure, > Ada gives you some "pragma shoot-myself-in-this-foot-too" options, but > they're not part of the mainstream use of the language, and they're > not the "obvious" way to do *anything*... and yet, Ada is still > flexible enough to implement operating system kernels on twisted > mutant intel hardware...) I don't know Ada, so I can't comment on it. Jeroen Dekkers -- Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org IRC: jeroen@openprojects
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