ambiguous ?

[Henry Spencer]

In article <14094 at lanl.gov> jlg at lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>> The looseness in the C language definition is deliberate,
>> because C was designed for systems programming,
>
>It seems to me that systems programming is exactly the context
>where "looseness" is least tolerable...

Unmanaged and unexpected looseness is indeed intolerable.  Looseness that
the programmer is aware of and allows for may make the difference between
a program which is too slow to do the job and one that runs efficiently.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu