strangest systems I've sent email from

[Diane Bruce]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 01:49:11PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> >> True, but again, *you shouldn't have to*. It means programmer
> >> effort, brain power, is being wasted on thinking about being safe
> >> instead of spent on writing better programs.
> 
> True, but...
> 
> > One side effect of this is that it makes a lot of C programmers
> > pedants.

Sooooooo true. I forget on here sometimes. ;)

> 
> It's true that C is easy to use unsafely.  However, (a) it arose as an
> OS implementation language, for which some level of unsafeness is
> necessary, and (b) to paraphrase a famous remark about Unix, I suspect
> it is not possible to eliminate the ability to do stupid things in C
> without also eliminating the ability to do some clever things in C.

My objection is to the effort to fix what should not be fixed in 'C'
and not fixing what should be fixed in a OS implementation or library/utility
language.

> Of course, the question is not whether C has flaws.  The question is
> why it's still being used despite those flaws.  The answer, I suspect,
> is what someone said about it being good enough.

C's success is breeding a lot of bad code(rs). It's too damn portable a
language. I'd also like to see more emphasis on something other than C.
We furiously agree here.

Diane
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