Re: OT: Language War (Re: "C" Manual)

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Richard Cobbe wrote:
> 
> Lo, on Sunday, December 30, Dimitri Maziuk did write:
> 
> > * William T Wilson (fluffy@snurgle.org) spake thusly:
> > ...
> > > So... why *should* the programmer concern himself with individual
> > > bytes of memory? (Assuming he is writing an ordinary application and
> > > not a hardware driver or something similar).
> >
> > Because if he does not, his application will segfault and dump core.
> 
> No.  This level of concern is necessary only for non-type-safe
> languages.  It is provably impossible for a program written in a
> type-safe language to segfault (assuming that the language's run-time
> system is implemented correctly, of course).

   ???

  it's the resource allocation that's important, not types. garbage
collectors are generally more robust as far as segfaulting (and similar
errors) go (of course, just because the program doesn't segfault it
doen't mean it's working correctly). the other important factor is how
much runtime check language does (e.g. checking for array boundaries
etc.)

  and as far as runtime system goes - only interpreted languages have
runtime systems.

	erik