Xref: utzoo comp.software-eng:3024 comp.lang.c:26504 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Errors aren't that simple Message-ID: Date: 1 Mar 90 19:27:15 GMT References: <39400075@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <8192@hubcap.clemson.edu> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 26 In article <8192@hubcap.clemson.edu> billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu writes: > Many members of the C community exhibit an unprofessional and > irresponsible attitude regarding defect control and especially > defect prevention. Many members of the programming community as a whole exhibit an unprofessional and irresponsible attitude regarding defect control and expecially defect prevention. C happens to be the most popular language on a wide range of hardware, by the chance that it happens to be well adapted to writing reasonably portable and reasonably efficient programs, without being particularly hard to implement or having particularly many functional shortfalls. Most other system programming languages are either harder to implement (such as ADA), do not fit well into the normal program linking model (such as Modula), or are simply inadequate without nonstandard extensions (most dialects of Pascal). Thus, simply by statistics one could predict that a large number of programs written in C are likely to contain major bugs. There are a large number of programs written in C, period. Would you care to address the confusing and dangerous deficiencies in the ADA language: operator overloading and the use of rendezvous for interprocess communication, for example? Have you read C. A. R. Hoare's Turing Award lecture, "The Emperor's New Clothes"? -- _--_|\ Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . / \ \_.--._/ Xenix Support -- it's not just a job, it's an adventure! v "Have you hugged your wolf today?" `-_-'