From: utzoo!decvax!duke!bcw
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: C Extensions
Article-I.D.: duke.2697
Posted: Wed Oct 27 19:02:59 1982
Received: Thu Oct 28 06:06:51 1982
References: sri-unix.4066

From:	Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University
Re:	C language standards

Well, I can't vouch for the mental capacity of the person who wrote the
code, but one of the early space shots failed because someone had
written a Fortran statement as "do 100 i=1.4" instead of the correct
"do 100 i=1,4" (I don't remember the exact statement but this is the
sense of the error).  Clearly the program hadn't been validated before
the launch - I don't think it even made it into orbit.  Fortran is
probably at least as prone to such problems as is C;  if you really
want strong typing you ought to be looking at Pascal and its derivitives
like Modula and Ada.

I can see the flames coming now.

			Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University