Typesafety versus Worse is Better - was Re: Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?

Eric Smith spacewar at gmail.com
Thu Dec 4 02:41:48 CST 2014


On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 12:30 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> And yet, we have APL, which doesn't give a fig about type.  If Ada is a
> fascist, APL is a hippie.   Yet, somehow, useful work gets done with it.

APL cares about type, but it's dynamically typed (like e.g. Python).
If you try to add a character to a number, or index off the end of an
array dimension, it catches a runtime error.  Unlike C, where indexing
off the end of an array is detected neither at compile time nor at
runtime, gives unpredictable results, and can therefore lead to
privilege escalation, information disclosure, and remote code
execution exploits.


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