Improving C

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

I agree with Hal's comments about people putting down other
programming languages.  

I started out in programming 16 years ago as a Fortran 
hacker, migrated to Pascal during my years
as a graduate student and eventually learned C on my own.
Along the way I picked up some Cobol, Lisp, PL/1, Snobol, and
APL experience.  

All the above languages have their strengths and weaknesses.
Some of the languages were invented before the field knew very 
much about compiler and programming language theory and their design
reflects the level of knowledge at the time of their invention.  Doubtless 
our knowledge in this area will continue to mature and future languages
will be better than what we have now.

Every programmer has a "favorite" language.  My favorite right now is
C and I appreciate its strengths, but I am not so blind as to ignore
it's weaknesses.  I suggest that before taking potshots at other 
languages that you investigate the issues involved further before
making false or misleading statements.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell, CS Dept. University of Texas at Austin
{seismo, ctvax, ihnp4, kpno}!ut-sally!smoot, smoot at ut-sally.{ARPA, UUCP}