
Beware C Hackers - ColinWright
http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/bewareCHackers.html
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informatimago
This article is not signed. It is wrong. Bertrand Meyer is right. Advising to
beware of a category of people is not overgeneralizing. It is good advice:
beware, observe and decide for yourself in each individual case.

You can compare two language specifications, ANSI C and ANSI Common Lisp: they
BOTH leave out-of-bound array accesses UNSPECIFIED.

However, Lisp programmers who write Lisp implementations all include RUN-TIME
bound checking (in addition to compilation time checks when possible), in most
implementations, even with the lowest safety level!

On the other hand, C programmers who write C implementations never include any
run-time bound checking (and seldom include compilation time checks, and at
most issue warnings, not errors). There's no notion of safety level in C.

We could also make the comparison with other languages and their programmers
and implementers.

C is not a high level programming language. It's a high level assembler
language, designed to program small system kernels when resources are
constrained.

Nowadays, we develop system kernels with automatic proof checkers, with with
resource constraints, and we should use high level programming language for
applications, not horrors like C or C++.

