On 11/11/2015 10:06 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
:-)
IMHO, many of those bugs, like buffer overflows, would be prevented by phasing out C, and using something else that does compile and run time time bounds checking.
+1 In many ways, PASCAL hid so many signs of this order that it deceived many students and never taught them other good practices; its emphasis on structured programming and scope was good ... for a teaching situation, but became highly criticised when it came down to performance. Now , as you go on to point out, that's no longer and limiting factor; correctness and error proofing have come to the forefront with more powerful computing engines.
C is very powerful, amongst other things, because it allows to do anything you wish, even if it is a mistake. Kind of a very high level assembler. With powerful CPUs we should have the computing power to switch to other languages that do checks.
When Perl came out I switched to that; realistically I ended up being much more productive and effective as a programmer. Perl is still incredibly powerful! But what the heck, Brooks wrote about the power and effectiveness of HLLs in TMMM. These days I work mainly in shell and Ruby. I forget if it was Brooks or Weinbaum who pointed out that as machines got faster, compliers and interpreters got faster as well. Its one thing to have the low level components in a language that is close to the hardware like C, but that also demands a rigour and testing that few can afford. Sadly that is rarely met. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org